The Night Watch [Paperback]

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.

The story follows the intriguing stories of four main characters; Kay, Viv, Helen and Duncan. The characterisation is fantastic and you don't have to read too much before you really get a sense of the type of person each character is and become totally absorbed in following the characters.
It's a very clever novel, starting in 1947, then going back to 1944 and ending in 1941, so as the blurb suggests, you end with the beginning. Like a previous reviewer I felt the last section wasn't really needed as it didn't further what you needed to know about the characters and for me personally I'd have prefered to have gone back to 1947 by that point as it felt like some of the storylines were left with loose ends.

The setting of war-torn London is brilliantly presented and described to the reader, and the sections on Kay and her work in the ambulance service are very gritty, realistic and historically accurate; going to bomb sites to deal with the injured and dead and how that affected her personality.
It's also excellent writing setting the scene and situations faced by the ordinary women working in London in the 1940s, and the things faced every day by people trying to go about their own business.

Throughout the book there is a wonderful suspense and tension and little things revealed all along, with some wonderful twists and plot links. A really good book should always leave the reader wanting more, but after reading this book not only did I want more, but it felt more like it was unfinished and I felt several things were left unresolved, unless of course that is the author's intention.
This is still a superb read though, and highly recommended.