by Sarah Blake
After reading Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns
Goodwin, I needed a page-turner in the worst way and by a stroke of good luck The
Postmistress fell into my hands the day after I had finished all 754 pages
of the story of Lincoln’s presidency (not including footnotes). While The Postmistress definitely
falls under the category of “chick lit”, it is a moving story that is well told
and refreshingly free of the usual romantic silliness that characterizes the genre. The basic premise of the story is that the lady
postmaster in a small New England village decides not to deliver a letter. As Postmaster, Iris James’ sworn duty is to
deliver the mail no matter what it contains or whom it is for. She knows full well what the letter in
question contains and by withholding it lets one person’s story play out
differently than it would have. This
novel could easily have been the victim of a trite plot line, however author
Sarah Blake displayed her considerable talent as a researcher. Ms. Blake succeeds in creating the main
characters, Iris James and Frankie Bard, imagining small town America still
reeling from World War I and in denial about the global threat posed by Germany
under the Third Reich, and providing vivid descriptions of war-torn Europe.
The story takes place during the World War II German bombing
of London, before the United States joined the fight against Adolf Hitler. At that time, important news of the world
arrived in newspapers, newsreels, and radio broadcasts. Edward R. Murrow was the first to bring the
theater of war into Americans’ homes with his descriptive, daily broadcasts
from London. Murrow and his team of
reporters dodged bombs and strafing runs in order to communicate to Americans
how desperate and dangerous the situation in Europe was becoming. Murrow’s gift was his narrative style with
which he calmly and unemotionally described the unspeakable horrors of
war.
While not unheard of,
women news reporters were extremely rare in Murrows’s day and Ms. Blake does a
good job of making Frankie Bard believable in that role. Frankie has a certain sang froid and toughness to her character which earns her the
respect of her male peers, and eventually the fictionalized Murrow hires her to
compile an on-air broadcast. Nervous at
first, Frankie soon develops her own voice and becomes a regular radio reporter
from London. Meanwhile, back in America
people find themselves increasingly moved by some of her stories detailing the
tragedies overseas. A visionary few
Americans who listened to the radio news broadcasts recognized the ease with
which a German submarine could attack the homeland.
Iris James, the postmaster of Franklin, Massachusetts, is 40
years old and unmarried; a kind-hearted busybody who prides herself on knowing
everyone’s business but keeping it to herself.
She finds herself in a romance with the town mechanic at an age when
many women were grandmothers. Harry Vale -- who has tasked himself with
watching the coastline for signs of German U-Boats, to the amusement of the
postmistress -- makes Iris’ acquaintance when he asks her to lower the flag pole
in front of the Post Office so as not to draw the Germans’ attention. She refuses to comply, citing a lack of
authority to do so, but then relents and writes a letter to the higher
authorities in Washington when she realizes that she is in love with Harry. (Janet Maslin, of the New York Times, tried unsuccessfully to make the flag pole into a
phallic metaphor, in her review of the book, which makes no sense given that
Iris is a willing virgin and Harry is feeling his manliness after a long period
of celibacy.) The Postmistress is
written in a straight-ahead style without symbolic references, hidden meanings,
or complex literary devices, which is why it is an easy and fast read. This is not to say it is devoid of literary
references: at one point Frankie
compares herself to Cassandra, the prophetic mad woman from Troy whom no one
could understand. It is an apt
comparison.
Emma Fitch, the bride of the town’s young doctor, is the
third heroine of this novel. Dr. Fitch
carries some baggage into the marriage which derails him when one of his
patients dies in childbirth. Unable to
cope with his guilt over the woman’s death, the doctor hurries off to London to
attend to war casualties. While there he
meets Frankie Ward in a bomb shelter and, as was frequently the case, the two
become quite close for a brief, but pivotal moment. In that brief time, Frankie comes to know
Will Fitch better than his wife ever will and because of that meeting, the
three women – Iris, Frankie, and Emma – become inextricably linked.
The Postmistress is at its best in the scenes of
war-ravaged Europe. Ms. Blake’s
uncomplicated writing style brings an immediacy to her descriptions of physical
and emotional wounds suffered on a massive scale. In the end Frankie cannot tolerate the
devastation she has dispassionately shared with her American audience, and
neither can many of her male counterparts.
“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” had not yet been identified, but
Frankie clearly suffered from it, as did Dr. Fitch, and thousands of others
whose lives were shattered by the relentless bombing raids and the atrocities
visited upon the Jewish people. Frankie
witnessed humans stripped of their humanity one time too often and the
protective armor which enabled her to do her job fell away, leaving her
smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable than she had understood her essential self
to be.
The journalist’s code of ethics, briefly, is to seek truth,
report it, and minimize harm. A good
journalist tells a story, without bias and as completely as possible, including
only verifiable facts. As fear-mongering
in the United States creates widespread paranoia, Murrow sends Frankie, armed
with a recording device (which the author acknowledges was not available when
Frankie would have been reporting from Europe) to interview people on the
refugee trains so that Americans can understand the whole story of the sudden
influx of German speaking immigrants.
With her collection of recordings, Frankie holds onto tiny shreds of
lives, which would otherwise have disappeared, and through these voices illustrates
the evil of Hitler and the Nazis. It is
the voices that prove her undoing. That
and the death of a young American man who looks in the wrong direction before
crossing a London street.
What stays with me after reading this book is the sense of
helplessness that pervaded Europe even though the trains continued to run between
countries -- right on schedule -- whether moving people to war, to safety, or
to death camps. With entire communities
collapsing into rubble all across London, there was no more normal. As a matter of national self-preservation,
trainloads of children were removed to the countryside and taken in by
strangers for the duration of the war.
It is easy to imagine postmasters and postmistresses all over England
wishing they could let innocent children continue to believe that their parents
would be waiting at home when the war was over.
Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander,all rights reserved
