Autor: Sarah Blake 

Wydawnictwo:  Penguin Books

Stron: 326

Stan: bdb/bdb-

Opis

 It is 1940, and bombs fall nightly on London.

In the thick of the chaos is young American radio reporter Frankie Bard. She huddles close to terrified strangers in underground shelters, and later broadcasts stories about survivors in rubble-strewn streets. But for her listeners, the war is far from home.

Listening to Frankie are Iris James, a Cape Cod postmistress, and Emma Fitch, a doctor's wife. Iris hears the winds stirring and knows that soon the letters she delivers will bear messages of hope or tragedy. Emma is desperate for news of London, where her husband is working - she counts the days until his return.

But one night in London the fates of all three women entwine when Frankie finds a letter - a letter she vows to deliver...

Recenzja (Janet Maslin, nytimes)

Delivering Bad News and Bearing It

Is there any hope for a novel that begins as “The Postmistress” does?” In the fall of 1940 a 40-year-old spinster named Iris James goes to visit a Boston doctor. She wants a written document attesting that she is, as the book says, “intact.” The lucky recipient of the letter will be Harry Vale, a mechanic who smells of axle grease and Old Spice and has a crypto-sexual fetish of his own. It concerns the height of the flagpole in Franklin, the small Cape Cod town where he and Iris both live.

Quick, take this to a higher symbolic plane. Presume that Iris’s letter is actually an expression of her fear for America’s safety as World War II approaches. And suppose that Harry’s ideas about the erect, high flagpole defy Freud. Sometimes a pole is just a pole, but this is not one of those times. Harry fears that German U-boats may show up off the Massachusetts coast, so he doesn’t want the flag outside Franklin’s post office any more visible than it has to be.

Out of these clumsy beginnings, Sarah Blake has coaxed forth a book that hits hard and pushes buttons expertly. Not for nothing does its publisher emphasize the resemblance between “The Postmistress” and “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s socially conscious pulp best seller. Each of these novels appropriates galvanizing social issues in the service of a well-wrought tear-jerker. And each is crammed with talking points. Ms. Blake, in some helpful closing comments about her thought processes in constructing “The Postmistress,” actually boils her novel’s central concern down to a single sentence: “How do you bear (in both senses of the word) the news?”

In a novel that implicitly links the events of 9/11 to the origins of World War II, that news hinges on dread. Iris runs the post office in a folksy, fictitious little burg where the citizens’ understanding of global political events varies dramatically from house to house. Some of Franklin’s residents see no connection between the problems in Europe and those in coastal Massachusetts, even though the draft has just gone into effect. Others, like Harry, are filled with worry. And Iris serves as the figure whose work represents order and reason. “The Postmistress” will of course put her capacity for detachment to a very extreme test.

Ms. Blake says that one part of the genesis of “The Postmistress” was the idea that a postal worker entrusted with getting letters to their addressees might have reason to commit a breach of ethics. (Handy talking point: Why is this book called “The Postmistress” when Iris emphasizes that she is a postmaster?) Another story element was the idea that news from afar might have trouble permeating a place like Franklin. So “The Postmistress” invents Frankie Bard, a famous “news gal” who works with Edward R. Murrow in London and is on the cutting edge of a transformative era in American war reporting.

Even though most broadcasters of the period were men, and the equipment lugged by Frankie is (Ms. Blake admits) something of an anachronism, the book makes her a ubiquitous voice on Americans’ radios and a tireless chronicler of the plight among European refugees. By the time “The Postmistress” has contrived a way to get Frankie from London to Franklin, everybody in Franklin has been shaken by the events Frankie has been heard to describe.

“The Postmistress” also has a third heroine: Emma Fitch, the wife of Will Fitch, Franklin’s nice young doctor. Ms. Blake is sufficiently good at string pulling to make Will not only horribly guilty about a medical situation that goes wrong but also determined to go help out in London because of what he’s heard Frankie say on the air. What’s more, she plants Will and Frankie in the same London bomb shelter. (And she makes bomb-shelter moments sound a good deal steamier than accounts of the London Blitz usually do.) She deserves credit for handling Will’s meeting with Frankie so carefully that the event becomes credible and vitally important to the book without undermining the story’s ideas about true love.

Where would a book named “The Postmistress” be without letters? Another trick Ms. Blake executes skillfully is to make certain letters pivotal to her story. And she writes those letters in ways that don’t prove anticlimactic when the envelopes are opened. The letters are so good that they outweigh the purple prose that suffuses this book when Iris and Harry begin making that doctor’s certificate irrelevant. The best parts of “The Postmistress” are certainly not those about how Iris “wanted skin and the soft marshland”—soft marshland?—“of this man’s body against her own.”

But the real strength of “The Postmistress” lies in its ability to strip away readers’ defenses against stories of wartime uncertainty and infuse that chaos with wrenching immediacy and terror. Ms. Blake writes powerfully about the fragility of life and about Frankie’s efforts to explain how a person can be present in one instant and then in the next, gone forever. Frankie grasps this when she watches two lovers kiss and thinks about the air that separates their bodies. It’s the same air, she realizes, that carries her own voice overseas. It’s the air between the gunners and their falling bombs. It’s because of that air, she thinks, that the world has become “a great whispering gallery for us all.”

Since all the heroines of “The Postmistress” are American, this isn’t a war story that features a Deborah Kerr role. It just feels like one. The nobility on Ms. Blake’s pages triumphs over the fear, which is one explanation of why this book will click in a major way. Another is that Ms. Blake knows how to deliver tragic turns of fate with maximum impact. When Frankie decides to intervene in the lives of other characters, for instance, she believes that she is being helpful. But Ms. Blake makes her terribly wrong about that. “She was the scissors,” the book says hauntingly at one such juncture. “And she had thought she was the thread.”