The Woman with the Map
There are many tricks one can play with dual narratives. In The Woman with the Map we have the same character in both streams, set in the same London district. In the ‘historic’ narrative (1941-45) Joyce is young, brave, adventurous, romantic and hopeful. In the later time-stream she is middle-aged, semi-reclusive, routine-obsessed, and fearful of moving to a new apartment. How did the young woman morph into this older self?
The historic narrative begins at the height of the London Blitz and carries through the V-bomb raids to the end of the war. Nineteen-year-old Joyce is a Senior Warden with the Civil Defence, in charge of the ‘incident map’, a wall chart in the Control Room on which she plots each bomb or missile strike and alerts the rescue services. In the course of the war she wins and loses a fiancé and loses all her close family. By 1945 she is emotionally drained and opts for a quiet existence. The second time stream plots her return to life.
At first glance Joyce had a ‘cushy number’, but Casey is good at describing the stress of a job requiring careful responses to demands far outside the operative’s control which often threaten to overwhelm her, amid the furious clamour of an air raid. We understand why she was ‘burnt out’.
A small cavil. Casey features air raid shelters with doors which could be closed and locked. Neither Andersen shelters nor public shelters had doors other than ‘blast doors’, freestanding shields of steel or brick several feet in front of the open entry. Shelters were designed to enter in extreme haste and exit easily. Closeable doors often jammed in a raid. Surviving shelters have doors because they were later used for storage. This is seldom crucial to the plot but annoys those many of us who remember the war.