The Postmistress by Sarah Blake (EN)

The Letter that Ends the Story and Starts the Encounter

There are books that I bought but never read. The Postmistress was one of them. The book was neatly stacked on my shelves since many weeks ago and was one of the novel that I avoided just because it’s romance. I’m always weak to romance novel because the sad ending got my eyes damp and my nose runny – most of the times. Even though the novel is categorized as romance, the story turns out to be interesting enough. Sarah Blake presents the love story between Emma and Will Fitch during the years before World War II as resolutely, beautifully, ironically and deeply.

Iris James is a postmaster who serves her duty in a small town of Cape Cod, Franklin, Massachusetts. Working as a postmaster gives her the control over a million of letters that come through her office, originating from other places and delivering various kinds of news. A string of sentences that makes out the whole story in a letter may change the life or end the hope that the receiver clings to. Thinking through the series of unanswered hopes of the receivers while sorting letters, sometimes Iris James wants to open the letters, reads the news and keeps the news from being delivered if there’s a chance of the news destroying a person’s hope. Letters about death, for instance. Or the kind of letter which Will Fitch entrusts to her a day before his departure to London and in which to be handed later to Will’s wife should anything bad happens to him.

During the years of 1940 – 1941, London was hardly a safe destination for traveling, nor did it has attractions to be visited. Will Fitch is a young doctor, just got his degree and is building his family with Emma Fitch in a small town in Franklin. Generally, the story of The Postmistress is circling around Emma and Will, with their love story as the focus. Will met Emma when Emma had nothing to hope for since her families died due to the bombings in England. Will was sparking the last hope in Emma when he proposed to her, that after they married, Emma makes effort to make Cape Cod and their house to be as comfortable as he wants life to be. However, life takes the wheel, and it is not the great turn that the wheel takes. Will is horribly guilty about a medical situation that goes wrong that he determined to help out in London. At this point, Sarah Blake is sufficiently good at string pulling to make Will not only feeling guilty but also responsible for what happens in London.

England was a mess due to Blitzkrieg by German’s armies when Frankie Bard, an American journalist, decided to move to London, giving away her life to sounding the despair and horrors in London to the world through radio waves in which she claims as “a great whispering gallery for us all”. Sarah Blake recalls the voice of Edward R. Burrow, the CBS correspondent who tries to awaken a sleeping America to the threat from aboard. It is he who inspires the moving words of Frankie Bard. Under Murrow’s direction, Frankie speaks into the microphone, telling the stories of the people like a milkman maintaining his supply of milk bottles to be sold to the buyers the next morning after the bombings like nothing happens, or of the boy who walks to his house the next morning after taking shelter only to realize the fact that his mother has died as his house crumpled due to the bombs. In London, when everybody is taking shelter, Frankie meets Will. And at the same time, in America, Emma is hoping for her husband to be back soon since she’s pregnant of their child. This is the thread that connects the story between the three main characters – Emma, Iris and Frankie.

The novel is interesting because Sarah Blake illustrates and describes the situation when Europe was engulfed by German Nazi. Behind the miseries and the uncertainties that the war brings, the life in America is going normally like war had never happened. Sarah Blake wants to make a point that while the Londoners taking shelter a minute before the bombings, the Americans turn off their radio which airing the war news, talking back to Frankie “she should get control of herself”. Sarah Blake also engages the readers to travel with Frankie all the way from London to the port in Lisbon through Berlin and France. During the travel, Frankie meets Jews refugees who plan to boarding the ships from Lisbon and sailing to the countries that want to accept them. Frankie listens and records the stories of the refugees, either it’s about their life before they were taken from their houses or after they hold their permits and wait for the trains to transport them to Lisbon. Sarah Blake describes refugees’ hopes and struggles in a simple way, yet she manages to keep the grim and sad situation of the story. Sarah is describing the places, the settings and the character’s feeling so precisely that the readers can almost picture them.

Unfortunately, besides Frankie’s stories, the novel doesn’t have any stand-out stories. Despite of Frankie’s movement and great character development, the novel offers nothing so standing out. The novel just lost its core; it only talks about Emma’s hopes and Iris’s anxieties over and over again. The Postmistress begins with three storylines wove together in the small Cape Cod town in the months leading up to the U.S.’s involvement in WW II, which are the potential to greater and more powerful conflicts. Unfortunately (again) the attempted interconnectedness between the three main characters is contrived, forced and unconvincing. I even feel that the encounter is an anti-climax to the story. Frankie is the only one that stands out in the novel, despite of the title which gives the idea that Iris James should be the center of the story. Moreover, the core of the story (which is the love story between Emma and Will) is somewhat missing in the middle of the novel and is only represented by few statements, so that when I came to the later chapters I didn’t even remember where the story has left Emma. The novel can reach the end just because Frankie leads the characters to it.

Finally, I finished the novel just because I have to. And in the end, I never really “got it”. Although, personally for me, the novel is lacking of emotional and powerful parts, there are some well-written and beautiful scenes. Actually, all the language is so rich that I manage to go through the story. Sarah Blake brings this period of history alive and she successfully uncovers the story of the civilians who loom behind the war. I would like to recommend the novel to classic romance readers.