Waiting for War

Sarah Blake's novel The Postmistress explores the same questions as The Sparrow (see below) and one of my other favorite philosophical novels, Albert Camus' The Plague: in the face of crimes against humanity—even when they haven’t yet touched us—what are our responsibilities? What do we believe in? Where do we find comfort? In a gripping story of war and its inexorable effects, Blake’s cast offers a variety of answers.

It is 1940, and Americans are watching anxiously as the German war machine marches across Europe and brutally bombs England. Across the ocean, on the tip of Cape Cod, postmistress Iris James, strait-laced, middle-aged, and certified virginal, takes her work very seriously. " If there was a place on earth in which God walked,” Iris believes, “it was the workroom of any post office in the United States of America. Here was the thick chaos of humanity rendered into order." Blind to the dangers of what is happening in Europe (she sees no reason to cut down the flagpole that a friend worries might lure attackers), Iris insists that goodness and order will triumph, just as the world’s mail will always reach its destination. The war across the sea will test Iris’s faith in an overarching plan and the role she plays in it.

Near Iris lives Emma Fitch, the new wife of Will, the town’s young doctor. Love has given Emma a sense of identity she never had, but Will, following a professional failure, doubts his competence and questions his destiny. Radio broadcasts from London detailing the horrors of the Blitz entice him to leave his home and wife to work in a London hospital. After he leaves, Emma discovers she is pregnant, and all she can do is write letters begging Will to return. Passive and one-dimensional, Emma is not a very interesting character on her own, but she represents “those who stand and wait,” while her husband strikes out in the only way he can against the evil of innocent suffering.


In a London bomb shelter—or “funk hole” as the Brits who huddled there called them—Will meets Frankie Bard, the American “girl” reporter whose radio stories lured him to London. Frankie is the real star of the novel, the one for whom it should have been named. Passionate, courageous, and idealistic, Frankie believes that, “given a choice, people would turn to good as they would to the light. I believed that reporting—honest, unflinching pictures of the truth—could be a beacon to lead us to demand that wrongs be righted, injustices punished, and the weak and innocent cared for…that the shoulder of public opinion could be put against the door of public indifference and would, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of angels.”

As they wait for the bomb run to end at dawn, Frankie and Will argue about what they can do to hold back the tide of suffering. Both are appalled by the meaningless destruction and random death of the blitz. Frankie’s role is to witness; words are her weapon: “Listen, the only way out of this is to tell it all. Tell what happens. All the time.”

Less a fighter than a fatalist, Will finds peace in the small part he can play. But “You can’t stop the mess,” he tells Frankie. “You can’t change what’s coming…and you shouldn’t try.” Frankie finds his acceptance maddening. ‘Whatever is coming does not just come, as you say. It’s helped by people willfully looking away. People who develop the habit of swallowing lies rather than the truth. The minute you start thinking something else, then you’ve stopped paying attention—and paying attention is all we’ve got.”

If Frankie can’t stop the mess, she is determined at least to report the stories, the big ones and the little ones. In Germany and occupied France she endures endless hours in trains full of refugees fleeing for their lives, and she records their hopes and fears, and sometimes their deaths, broadcasting their voices to Americans on the verge of war so they will know why they must join the fight.

Finally, exhausted by what she has witnesses but cannot stop, Frankie returns to America and goes to Cape Cod for a rest and a mission. She meets the postmistress and balks at Iris’s belief in cosmic order and her willingness to sit back and wait or things to work themselves out. “It’s you, Miss James,” Frankie tells Iris, “not some high-flying order, not some reason. It’s just us down here, doing our jobs.”

Author Sarah Blake says in her afterword that her story is about “the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can’t bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?” Her answer, clearly, is that whatever role we choose to play in the human tragedy, we must not turn away.

The Postmistress offers both a gripping, well written story and a springboard for thought. Serious readers who look for more than entertainment in their books will welcome both the historical perspective and the still-relevant reminder to pay attention. And paying attention, as Frankie shows, is the first step toward saving ourselves and each other.