The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

What do you do when faced a moral dilemma? What about when it is one that also pushes the boundaries of legality? What is truth? How much of life is down to fate and chance, the result of ‘looking left when we should have been looking right?’
All these big questions are posed by Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress, but for many readers, after seeing the book on numerous 2011 must-read lists, the main question is going to be ‘does it live up to its hype?’
The Postmistress follows the lives of three women in the formative years of the Second World War – the feisty and passionate Frankie, an American journalist on the ground in London, sending nightly radio reports of the Blitz,Iris James, a Cape Cod postmistress, and Emma Fitch, a doctor’s wife new to Iris’s town.
An ambitious novel, Blake has successfully navigated the interweaving of these plot lines to avoid any overt feeling of engineering them together.
As well as posing these moral questions, Blake successfully explores the relationship between the individual and society, the micro and macro. The micro actions of Frankie and Iris, who through their choice of words and decisions to deliver post, are a metaphor for the wider question of how much America really knew about what was happening in Europe.
‘The French have had a hard enough time, without all these people, Jews and what have you…to deal with’ (Florence Cripps, the B&B owner in Cape Cod).
Similarly, Frankie’s radio reports focus on the individual in London, the boy losing a mother, the girl taking a wrong turning, each tale a microcosm for the devastation and destruction facing England’s capital.
Blake, through Frankie, is concerned with ‘the edges of a war photograph or news report into the moments just after or just before we read or see or hear’ and via the integration and narrative weaving of threads successfully builds a picture of lives connected in many ways, and a million other tendrils that we have yet to follow.
It is very clear throughout the novel that Blake is interested as much in the process of writing as she is in the journey of her characters.
Criticisms for its historical accuracy seem a little unfair. Historical fact would never describe the Blitz as ‘bombs were falling on Coventry, London and Kent. Sleek metal pellets shaped like the blunt tipped ends of pencils.’
In fact, such poetic description of harrowing events in themselves add to the ongoing dilemma of what is being communicated, and whether these words represent reality.
The language can be overly extravagant, Blake’s florid prose at times being more frustrating than descriptive, but as a writer as well as reader, I enjoyed this.
However, theme and style do take precedence over plot, which may be why opinion is divided as to whether it is an inaccessible exploitation of a well-formed vocabulary, or an emotional and compelling read.
Blake is certainly a talented wordsmith, and this is the abiding impression that one is left with. She allows unfinished threads, just like Frankie realises that ‘the story just whispers off in the dark.’
More a beautiful treatise on love, war, and choice, with no happy endings, this is no neat little piece of chick-lit. It is about life, and for that reason alone deserves to be read in 2011.

http://forbookssake.net/2011/02/22/the-postmistress-by-sarah-blake/