The Night Watch

I've read other books by Sarah Waters and liked them. The Night Watch is definitely my favorite.

This is a WWII novel unlike any other I know. It offers views of some lives rarely shown at the center of a war story--ambulance drivers, conscientious objectors in prison, secretaries, all brought to life through the richly told stories of a few characters. Some like Kay come into their own under the distorting conditions of bombardment. Others like Duncan come mostly apart. What happens as conditions change? Sarah Waters helps us see the intensity and the reversals. Beautifully done; It's a wonderful book.

"We never seem to love the people we ought to; I can't think why." These words, spoken by one of the central characters near the end of this sensitive book, might well serve as the epigraph for the whole. As a love story, it is passionate and true, but untidy because it is true; the truth and awkwardness go hand in hand, both beautifully reconciled by Sarah Waters' unusual narrative method. The novel traces the changing emotional relationships among a group of women (plus a few men) whose lives intersect in London during the two main periods of the Blitz, in 1941 and 1944. So completely do we get to know these characters that it is tempting to talk about them as though already conversant with their backgrounds. But one of the joys of Sarah Waters' storytelling is the manner in which she reveals information piece by piece, starting after the War and working backwards. It would be a shame to spoil this pleasure for a new reader. But one can at least quote the opening sentence: "So this," said Kay to herself, "is the sort of person you've become: a person whose clocks and wrist-watches have stopped, and who tells the time, instead, by the particular kind of cripple arriving at her landlord's door." The year is 1947, and Kay appears as a casualty of war, living alone in a declining area of South London, in a poky flat in the house of a faith healer. Yet we shall soon glimpse a different Kay: a woman of elegance and style, performing almost daily acts of heroism in her wartime work, and responsible for many of the epiphanies of grace which illuminate this story of a dark period. The book has three sections: the first, set in 1947, is 175 pages in the paperback edition; the second, set in 1944, is the longest at 290 pages; the third, set in 1941, is only 50 pages. Reading it is rather like going to the movies in those days, picking up in the middle of the feature, then watching the program round again to discover how it all began. It has the advantage of heading towards two different kinds of ending simultaneously: there is the ending of each chronological section, and there is the ending of the book as a whole. The endings in the 1947 section are mostly hopeful but never pat, all utterly believable, and untidy as true things generally are. This is mostly the case with the 1944 section as well. Two of the three short episodes in the concluding 1941 section, however, are bright as a button; descriptions of how the characters first met, they are crisp and compact because they shine with possibility unshaded by subsequent events. The third 1941 episode describes an event that has been glimpsed as a shadow over in the life of the main male character, Duncan, now brought into the light for the first time. If there had been any doubt as to the wisdom of Waters' narrative method, the bracing cocktail of these last fifty pages triumphantly dispels it. But no matter how she chooses to tell it, I would read any Sarah Waters novel for her portrayal of women. T

The Night Watch, nominated for Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize, has been written with an enthralling narrative gimmick. Divided into three sections, it tells the story of six characters in wartime London beginning in 1947, stepping back to 1944 and finishing in 1941. You learn where they ended up by page 150 and spend the next 300 pages finding out how they got there. This turns the events of the story on their head in interesting ways. When one of the characters remarks during the war that "we might all be dead tomorrow," you know they won't. Their fatalism falls on deaf ears; German planes drop bombs night after night that will never find them. As a cheating husband tells his mistress "you wait until after the war ... it'll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time," you've already learned with certainty that it's an empty promise. The story's constructed as a mystery in which the details of the characters' lives are the mystery, so describing them individually would ruin surprises. The six are ordinary people living in London, dealing with World War II and tied together by romance or coincidence. Four of the six are gay -- one newspaper reviewer claims Waters has the literary goal of "writing lesbians back into history" -- but the novel builds on universal romantic obstacles like jealousy, self-esteem and guilt rather than issues particular to sexual orientation. The author Martina Cole paid £1,000 pounds in a charity auction to be a character in the book. Her money bought her E.M. Cole, a female ambulance driver protective of her cigarettes who has disreputable friends selling black market coffee, soap and lingerie. The Night Watch is an excellent novel with some violence and biblically unsanctioned sexual content that might turn off James Dobson but not Ted Haggard. I haven't read a book with literary aims this ambitious in years, and clearly I'm missing out.

I love a unique way of telling a story and Sarah Waters has employed just such a thing in her latest novel, "The Night Watch"; she tells the story in reverse but it has the effect of being wonderfully "inside out". The novel begins with partial expositing of an interesting and unusual group of characters striving to rebuild their lives in London just after WWII. Waters' characters are the marginalized of society, lesbian ambulance drivers, conscientious objectors, prisoners...in her bibliography I noted a reference book about how the "unimportant people" survived the war years; Waters does an excellent job of drawing us into those kinds of lives. The reader is immediately intrigued by these characters and eager to fill the lacuna in their stories, so Waters then shifts the narrative to during the war and the gaps close nicely...almost. In the end we go back even further to put the final pieces in place and find that things are not what we might have assumed at all! Not only does this structure work beautifully in this story, it also assumes intelligence on the part of the reader. Walters never "talks down" to us or over-explains...sometimes a single subtle sentence tells us all we need to know...we "get it" all. What a great read!

Wow! I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I picked up this lengthy novel, but my time was well spent. I read the unabridged version of the book on CD in my car during my long commute. It took a long time, but I found myself actually looking forward to traffic jams so I could sit in the car and listen longer. I even found myself sitting in my garage once I got home because I couldn't turn it off. Waters introduces a wonderful cast of characters that I won't go into too much here because other reviewers have already done so, but a few notes are warranted. My favorite character is Viv. She struggles with much as a young woman in love with a married soldier during the war. Her brother, Duncan, is also a constant source of worry for this enigmatic woman. She has my utmost respect in most areas, but has my pity in others. Duncan started off as my favorite character, but I lost interest in his antics about midway through the book. His relationships with Mr. Mundy and Frasier are deep and disturbed. Helen is a pathetic character you can't help but like. She's torn between Kay and Julia. She cheats on one and is cheated on by the other. Kay is a lover, plain and simple. When she loves you, it's undeniable. At the same time it's smothering. Julia is the aristocratic writer who is the epitome of "free" artist. She's my least favorite character because she seems extremely shallow and uncaring. I appreciate the method Waters uses with timing in the book. She starts at the end and ends at the beginning. I was a little distracted at first because of this, but after I got recalibrated with each time shift I realized it was a great approach. I read a lot. This was one of the best, highest quality books I've read in a long time. It reminded me of many of the literature classics I read in high school in college (yes, that was a long time ago, but I still remember!). Don't let the sheer size of this one scare you. It's well worth the time required to get from front cover to back cover. Extremely highly recommended.