The Night Watch - Sarah Waters

The cover of the proof copy of Sarah Waters new novel comes adorned with what might well be the subtitle of the book: “A Lot Of People Who Lived Through the War Don’t Like to Talk About It”, but it’s not just the war that is discreetly pushed aside by each of the characters, it is their unwillingness to face up to who they are, to the secret lives they were forced to lead and the terrible actions that each of them were driven to during a very turbulent time in their lives.

Opening in 1947 after the war, each of the characters has a dark secret they wish to block out. Helen and Viv work together in a London dating agency on Oxford Street. Helen is in love with Julia, a writer of mystery fiction, but the necessity of keeping her love secret and her own jealousy is tearing their relationship apart. Viv is having an affair with a married man, Reggie – a relationship that is doomed as he is never going to leave his wife. Viv’s brother Duncan was imprisoned during the war years over an incident that is of great distress to his father and sister. A sensitive boy, he lives now with his ‘Uncle Horace’ who he knows from prison. When by chance he meets Fraser, who he also knew from prison, the claustrophobic, locked-away existence becomes too much for him to bear, but Fraser also opens Viv’s eyes to how restricted her own life with a married man is. Connecting many of these characters is Kay, a mysterious boyish-looking girl, who seems to have endured the hardships of the war better than most, but to a cost. The toll of the war years on the characters is covered in the remaining two sections of The Night Watch as it then moves backwards in time to 1944 and 1941.

Rather than heading towards a larger mainstream readership that she might have been tempted towards after the success of the Booker nominated Fingersmith, Sarah Waters takes a surprising change of direction here, adopting a more serious and realistic tone for her gay characters than the Victorian lesbian romps of her earlier books. The Night Watch is almost unrelentingly bleak, starting by leaving its characters in unpleasant situations from what happened during the war and leaving them unresolved. Travelling backwards it then fully lives up to all the hints of dark events in the first part. Those events are often the common everyday stuff of friendships, extra marital affairs, petty jealousies and fears, but through the setting of the war and the intolerance of the period itself to all the central relationships, the book achieves an incredible emotional pitch - particularly when the outcome of the characters lives is already known.

One or two quibbles aside – the author rather overdoes the colloquial period use of the word ‘queer’ which comes across as too deliberate and pointed and the backwards structure doesn’t provide a proper sense of closure or completeness to the characters, (the final 1941 epilogue/prologue at the end feels unnecessary, adding little to what we already know or can work out and undercutting the tone of what has come before) – Sarah Waters writing here is superb. Avoiding narrative contrivance, the author keeps the tone realistic and authentic, the dialogue and connections between her characters naturalistic, making each of these figures utterly real and of their time and making the reader care about the unknown outcome of each one.