Griffin and Sabine: They finally meet, after 25 years, in finale to famed series

The moment has finally come for Griffin and Sabine to meet in person.

Introduced in the 1991 best-seller Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence, author Nick Bantock's famous literary couple have expressed their intense, life-sustaining love in hundreds of love letters across six epistolary novels.

A singular, peculiar couple who have never actually met, Bantock's lovers return this month in The Pharos Gate: Griffin & Sabine's Lost Correspondence (Chronicle Books), which is supplemented with the publication of a 25th anniversary edition of the first book in the series.

Can love survive this long without physical contact? Separated by thousands of miles - he's a London artist, she the child of a remote South Pacific island - they have never looked into each other's eyes. They've never kissed. Like some postmodern reincarnation of medieval lovebirds Abelard and Héloïse, their love lives and breathes through their letters.

"After 25 years, they essentially have a life of their own," Bantock said of his beloved couple. "My job as artist or writer is to tap into their voices."

For a quarter century Griffin and Sabine - not to mention Bantock's millions of fans - have expressed a a yearning that the couple finally consummate their love. Bantock, 66, finally has succumbed: He stages the couple's meeting in his seventh Griffin and Sabine book.

Trained as a painter in his native England, Bantock had a successful career as a book illustrator until 1990, when he and his wife, artist Kim Kasasian, moved with their four children to Canada. Already in his early 40s, Bantock gave up illustration and tried writing.

The result was the first Griffin and Sabine book and its sequels, genre-bending illustrated 3D volumes that contain gorgeously illustrated postcards and envelopes that open to reveal actual physical letters. The books have delighted romance fans as well as academics, who have written volumes about the Bantock's way of questioning the boundary between literature and painting.

Bantock has since published 25 books, including children's pop-up volumes. His books, which have sold 5 million copies worldwide and been translated into 13 languages, almost always incorporate visual elements, a combination Bantock likens to a marriage.

"The images carry the story as much as the words. They are not illustrations of a story but have narrative force, too," he said in a recent phone interview. "I encourage people to stay open to the imagery and allow it to pass through them without trying to translate [it] into words. Images are ways by which we think intuitively."

Bantock said the physical letters in the books give readers a sense that Griffin and Sabine's love somehow is unique, different from love in the age of e-mail and social media.

"A different kind of relationship arises through letter-writing," he said from his home on Saltspring Island, a small, verdant patch of land near Vancouver. "It's a function of the kind of time taken. When you write at [a slower] speed, what comes out of you through your heart down to your arms and your fingers and the pen is different. It will surprise you."

Bantock, who continues to exhibit his paintings, is no luddite - he has also created an electronic version of his tale, Griffin & Sabine: The Interactive Trilogy and a Windows CD-Rom game, Ceremony of Innocence, which won two BAFTA awards in 1998.

He says his visual work has one overriding concern - to help us slow down and appreciate what we see. "We have forgotten how to see," he said. "I think people who look at pictures today see them as flashcards: transient, constantly wiped clean every six seconds."

He derides the way consumer culture has taken over the pace of life: "Consumerisn has given us this sense of always wanting the next thing, of rushing onwards without a considered thought."

It takes just a cursory glance at Griffin and Sabine's letters to realize their story isn't the stuff of romance novels.

Filled with allusions to alchemy, mysticism, and Jungian psychology, Bantock's books fit into a certain hermetic tradition that uses romantic love as a metaphor for spiritual awakening.

"I planned these stories to work on many layers," said Bantock, who explained a few of them: "It's a mystery about the pursuit of self-understanding; a passion play; a struggle to awaken; a hero's journey for two; a chess match with darkness; an alchemical marriage."

Like German novelist Hermann Hesse, whom he sees as a kindred spirit, Bantock uses the love story to illustrate the self's internal journey to achieve freedom from hypocrisy and complete itself.

Social life encourages us to create false masks, to compromise, to hide our true creativity, Bantock said. Love, as he sees it, frees us of falsehood.

From this point of view, the love Griffin and Sabine express "isn't so much the longing for a mate or for companionship," said Bantock, "but for the wholeness we all crave, the wholeness of being at one with the universe."

"Too often we become addicted to different kinds of opiates. Internally [speaking], we become fat and lazy," Bantock said. Love, on the other hand, "wakes us up to the extraordinary expanse and potential of the universe."

Griffin and Sabine, added the author, have "a true alchemical marriage in this sense."

Well, they will, by the end of The Pharos Gate.

Don't expect an actual wedding. Griffin and Sabine's union is much more cosmic, evocative, mysterious.

tirdad@phillynews.com

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