The Night Watch
Sarah Waters Virago, 473pp, £16.99
ISBN 1844082466
Sarah Waters's new novel is another exercise in nostalgia. She has abandoned the Victorian lesbian milieu of Fingersmith for wartime London, postwar austerity and tales of awfully brave chaps and gels facing out the Blitz. The book itself is a pastiche object: handling its artfully distressed jacket, the reader appears to be clutching a second-hand romance that survived the bombs.
The Night Watch follows four characters - the tough ambulance driver Kay, a confused young couple, Reg and Viv, and Duncan, Viv's fragile brother - who would normally be relegated to the margins of history. Duncan is in prison after a homosexual suicide scandal and shares a cell with a handsome conscientious objector. Kay and her fellow butch dykes are the heroines: courageous ambulance drivers who pick up body parts, prise corpses off railings or dig survivors out from wrecked buildings. Reg and Viv's love story contains the most graphic and horrendous description of a botched abortion, which seems like an Awful Warning against bareback sex. But the lesbian love affairs, narrated in breathless detail, are hardly any happier. For this novel is haunted by enormous sadness and doomed, fatal loves, which end in tears, blood and betrayal.
Waters has made the intriguing decision to narrate her story backwards. We are introduced to the characters in 1947. Then, amidst the mini-Blitz of 1944, she describes the crucial turning points in their lives, the moments of choice that have made them what they are. Finally, we see the beginnings of their stories. Back in 1941, Reg and Viv, locked in a lavatory on a train, begin to fancy one another. Duncan's seductive friend Alec, in a direct reference to E M Forster's Maurice, taps on his window. Kay digs her fatal treacherous lover, aptly named Helen, out of the ruins. But not to worry; we have already seen Helen get her come-uppance.
In this way, characters we may not have liked - or may even have despised - suddenly appear in a fresh light as we get to know their stories. This may be what often happens in real life, but it denies us some of the greatest pleasures of fiction: the moment of choice, the drama of suspense, the anxiety generated by the unfolding of events. Charged moments, such as Kay finding her flat blitzed to bits and imagining that her lover has been pulverised, become darkly ironic. The fate of each character is fixed in time.
This method, used by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, suggests a dense, tightly written experimental novel: a melancholy book made taut by a grim metaphysics of inevitable loss. Yet the linguistic texture of The Night Watch - breezy, fast-paced, accessible - never encourages the reader to pause or reflect. Waters is interested not in the metaphoric possibilities of language, but in pace, plot and storytelling. The in-verted structure thus seems perverse.
Yet there is much to give any reader pure pleasure. The text is saturated in period detail: the ration books, the wireless, the blackout, the ARPs, silk pyjamas, Max Factor inches thick, Bakelite light-bulb holders, wartime bureaucracy and typist pools. The dialogue is terrific: authentically dated turns of phrase such as "I say", "most frightfully", "dear girl", "look here" and "why don't you?" abound. The intensive research, to which the bibliography at the end of the novel bears witness, is completely incorporated into the text. There are no dull expositions about where the iron railings have got to, or why fruit is so hard to come by. All the constraints of daily survival are absorbed into the descriptive writing or the problems faced by the characters. Waters even teaches us the value of the pound in the 1940s without appearing to do so.
Angus Calder's Myth of the Blitz does not figure in the bibliography, but sentimental myths of wartime love are all present. The twist is that the boys don't want to fight: it's the women who are the heroes.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
