The sound of one hand writing?

John Berger’s mysterious epistolary novel is a love story that explores the spiritual politics of politics.

The epistolary novel, which uses letters written by its characters in place of traditional chapters, presents a number of unique difficulties to its author and readers. There is no objective voice; every line in the missives is filtered through the perception of a possibly unreliable character. There are no “live” moments, so any chances for immediacy are eliminated from every scene.

No narrator means there’s no organic means of justifying a time lapse or flashback. British art critic, novelist, and polemicist John (“G.” “To the Wedding”) Berger compounds these problems in his latest novel, “From A to X: A Story in Letters,” which takes the epistolary structure a step further into the enigmatic.

Notice, the novel is not called “Between A and X.” This is a one-way conversation, a series of letters from A’ida to her lover, Xavier, serving two life sentences in prison for some undefined revolutionary activity. And while we are informed in a short preface (penned by a sort of meta-Berger) that Xavier received and responded to A’ida’s letters, we don’t get to read his half of the correspondence. The risks of this approach are obvious. Consider those expository phone conversations in movies, which allow you to hear only the protagonist’s side of the dialogue: “Wait a minute, Mom, you’re saying that you’re coming to the family reunion…with your new boyfriend?”

But Berger is not a Booker Prize-winning author for nothing. While his newest novel purports to be written in letters, it is as far from the wide-ranging chorus of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” or even the back-and-forth of “Griffin and Sabine,” as it is from a typically narrated novel. In reality, From A to X is a monologue masquerading as separate letters. It is a torrent of thought and idea, reminiscent of the final chapter of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (which may explain why the penultimate chapter features no fewer than 18 “yeses”, mimicking Molly Bloom’s ultimate affirmation with lines like “Yes, yes, yes, yes. Each yes is a dish I’m going to prepare for the friends I’ve invited.”)

This impression of a single missive divided up arbitrarily into pieces is further supported by Berger’s statement that the letters are not presented in chronological order. Though they have been grouped into three packets, we are encouraged to “change them” around. In other words, their ordering doesn’t matter, because they are all of a piece. It’s at this moment, not three pages into the novel, that the mysteries begin.

Of course, just as “From A to X” presents a new take on the epistolary novel, its variation on the mystery novel takes surprising twists and turns. Instead of solutions becoming clear over the course of the narrative, it is the mysteries themselves that we begin to discern. Late in the book, A’ida, who works as s pharmacist, writes about a diabetic whose life she’d saved by feeding him sugar water. When she meets him again, years later, he has become a poet. He reads to her in a language she doesn’t know, and then explains why the poem is better left untranslated:

“We tend to think secrets are small, no? Like precious jewels or sharp stones or knives that can be hidden and kept secret because they’re small. But there are also secrets which are huge, and it is because of their immensity that they remain hidden except to those who have tried to put their arms around them.”

The paragraph contains the essence of Berger’s book. We never know the “correct” order of the letters. We never know what crimes Xavier committed. We never know in which country the story is taking place. We never know if Xavier escaped from prison, or if he saw A’ida again. Personally, I think the book hinted that A’ida suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, because she draws pictures of healthy hands in many of her letters, and mentions the anti-arthritis drug Humira. Yet the failure of these mysteries to be resolved never seems to matter.

Why? Because we are distracted from how much we don’t know by how much we do.

A’ida is a vital character, and her goal in writing to Xavier is to deliver to him the world he is missing. She rhapsodizes about movement, color, love, touch, and taste. Her ecstatic description of an almond biscuit recalls the evocative power of a certain petit madeleine. The love letters are shot through with the fervor of revolution, yet politics seldom rears its head directly. In fact, the brief scribbles of Xavier’s that we read “on the backs” of A’ida’s letters are the weakest part of the book; they are clichés of revolutionary thought. A’ida’s description of the razing of another character’s home as “amnesia…of the tangible” does more to evoke the horror of war than all Xavier’s references to Fanon, Evo Morales, and Hugo Chavez put together.

That’s not to say that “From A to X” isn’t at its core a political book, only that it transcends easy categorization. In some ways it is about the spiritual politics of politics. What do we give up when we dedicate ourselves to a cause? Is the soul something that can be contained in a prison? Is life ever more than waiting? The answers that A’ida gives us are beautiful and incomplete — beautifully incomplete. But they have something to do with purpose, and something to do with love: “How is it when, in the emptiness of the night, I say ‘I love you’ I receive something immense? The silence is as total as before. It’s not your response I’ve received…Yet I am fulfilled…If we understood this, we’d have no more fear, Ya Nour. I love you.”

Berger’s novel leaves us with dozens of unanswered questions just like this one, yet we, too, are mysteriously fulfilled rather than flummoxed. “There’s no larger mistake possible than to believe that an absence is nothingness,” A’ida tells us. “The difference between the two is a question of timing…Nothingness is before and absence afterwards.”

She is talking about Xavier of course, but the sentiment perfectly evokes the resonance of Berger’s one-way fable. Nothingness before, and absence afterwards.