Reprinted from Green Man Review.
The Night Watch is the most recent work by the young British novelist Sarah Waters. I managed to get through about two-thirds of her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet, a few years ago. (I quit when the main character, Nancy, found herself in the household of a wealthy lesbian with obvious sado-masochistic interests.) I picked up a copy of one of her other novels, Fingersmith, at a used bookstore a year or so ago. One of these days I’ll even get around to reading it. What all her novels share in common is lesbian main characters (and a fair amount of lesbian sex) and settings in London during different historical periods, so far all falling roughly between 1850 and 1950.
In The Night Watch, Waters takes a look at life in London during and after the Blitz. Somewhat notorious for her inventive approaches to plot structure, Waters’ trick in this book is to reverse the time sequence, so the first part of the book (about 150 pages) is set in 1947, the next part (250 pages’ worth) in 1944, and the very last part (just under 50 pages) in 1941. One of the characters even makes a reference to this effect of going back through time, telling another character that she likes to go into the movie theater when the feature is already half over and watch the second half first. I have certainly read more than a few novels in which large parts of the story were told in flashback. Sometimes it works better than others. I don’t think it works as well as it might in The Night Watch. Let me see if I can explain that in the following paragraphs.
Like many British novels, The Night Watch features a relatively large cast of characters and no particular main protagonist or plot line. When we first encounter the characters in 1947, we see the following: Duncan Pearce is a young man who has served time in prison for a crime that we eventually ‘witness’ in the last part of the novel. While at his workplace, Duncan runs into his old cell-mate, Robert Fraser, whom he obviously admires. We discover that Fraser was in prison for being a ‘conchy’, a conscientious objector. Duncan lives with an older man named Horace Mundy who makes regular visits to a Christian Science practitioner. Duncan calls him ‘Uncle Horace’ but it’s pretty clear that they are not related in that way. Kay Langrish lives alone in a garret apartment in the building where the Christian Science practitioner works. She watches Duncan and Mr. Mundy arrive for the latter’s appointments, without knowing either of them by name. While Kay doesn’t seem to have paid employment, she occasionally visits a woman mechanic named Mickey who lives on a houseboat. Duncan’s sister Vivien lives with their father, works at a dating service with a woman named Helen Giniver, and is carrying on a somewhat tawdry affair with a married man named Reggie. Helen lives with a writer named Julia Standing and is jealous of Julia’s editor, Ursula.
London in 1947 was still in the early stages of recovering from the appalling damage inflicted by the war. Waters gives an early and intense image of this in Duncan’s impression of the house where the Christian Science practitioner and Kay live (page 7): ‘. . .it was the last surviving building on what had once, before the war, been a long terrace; it still had the scars, on either side, where it had been attached to its neighbours, the zig-zag of phantom staircases and the dints of absent hearths’. Londoners in 1947 were still feeling shell-shocked, deprived of creature comforts, suffering from the loss of their homes and family members, and more than a little demoralized by the daunting recovery process, barely underway.
Waters’ characters as we encounter them in this part of the book seem to be going through the motions of their daily lives without being fully engaged in them. They appear to be suffering from a terrible lassitude with occasional bouts of sheer panic, probably a repressed form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps for them, peace is even more frightening than war. Some years ago I read Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, also set in the early post-war period. His characters suffered from severe forms of mental illness, rendering them and their daily lives more interesting to read about. Perusing the first section of The Night Watch, I had trouble getting sufficiently interested in any of these characters to motivate me to want to learn anything about their past.
Fortunately, Waters’ descriptions of the settings were good enough to keep me going. The second part of The Night Watch, set in 1944, worked much better for me in terms of dramatic intensity. I discovered that, during this earlier period, many of the characters had jobs that filled critical needs related to the war. For example, Kay and Mickey were ambulance drivers and thus also first response emergency care workers. Much of the narrative in this section concerns their experiences and encounters while out on service runs with the bombs literally falling around them. I found this extraordinarily absorbing reading, but then I have read a lot about life during wartime, so the context made sense to me. Julia worked with her architect father, spending her days in and around bombed-out buildings, assessing the damage and estimating the cost of restoring them to habitable condition. Again, I enjoyed the descriptions of the buildings and of her work. Although Helen and Vivien held office jobs, they, too, seemed to be doing their part for the war effort. All the characters seemed, during this section of the book, to have something to live for — even Duncan in prison looked forward to his eventual release. I didn’t get the same sense of emotional engagement in the first part of the book, at all.
The third part, set in 1941, feels like a coda. It’s short, as I’ve already noted. For the most part, it seems that Waters is using it to tell us just a few more details about the characters’ pasts that might help us to make sense of them in the futures we have already seen. We finally find out, for example, what gentle Duncan did to earn a prison sentence. We witness Vivien’s first meeting with Reggie, on a train, and Kay’s first meeting with Helen at the site of a bombing. While it was nice finally to have some of those nagging questions resolved, since the reverse order of the narrative means we already knew what became of those characters, the placement of this information at the end of the book made for a rather odd, let-down sensation, at least for me.
I mentioned in my opening paragraph that Waters writes about lesbian relationships and lesbian sex. Don’t worry, she hasn’t lost that in The Night Watch. I would say she’s toned it down a bit, at least from Tipping the Velvet. In this book, all the lesbian characters seem to be pretty sure of their preferences and not at all uninitiated in the appropriate social and physical practices. While occasionally one or another character faces a situation where she feels she can’t publicly express her feelings for her partner or talk about her relationship, there is no overt harassment in The Night Watch. I recall one fairly ugly scene in which a character in a fit of jealous rage cuts herself with a razor blade, and another scene in which the lovemaking gets rough. There are also some very minimal references to male homosexual relationships. I don’t typically look for novels with much explicit sex in them, whether the partners are the same sex or not. But The Night Watch is sufficiently low key in this regard so that the few sex scenes depicted didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the rest of the novel.
Coincidentally, while I was reading The Night Watch, I was also watching two British series set during World War II, Foyle’s War and Danger: UXB (UXB is the acronym for unexploded bomb). While I must admit it was more than a little depressing to spend that much time each day vicariously participating the experiences of people living in Britain during World War II, the various sources proved mutually enlightening. I was easily able to make connections among the narratives with regard to such characteristics as the somewhat desperate way the characters related to each other; their struggles to get enough to eat; and their reactions to the constant whine of the air raid sirens, the airplane motors, and the bombs falling — not to mention their intense smoking and drinking habits. I’m sure it also helped that I read and reviewed London 1945 not long ago.
Needless to say, The Night Watch is easy to find on the shelves of your favorite local bookstore and on-line. While I reviewed the hard cover edition, a trade paper version is already available.
(Riverhead Books, 2006)
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