If Sarah Waters were an unpublished writer and had submitted the manuscript of “The Night Watch” to an agent or publisher, chances are it would have been returned to her with a notation something like, “It’s all very well, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.” Out of such lame business/literary judgments is born the lame sameness of much of today’s fiction.
While they were at it they might also have noted that “The Night Watch” doesn’t go anywhere in reverse: It begins in London in 1947, as the rubble is being removed but rationing isn’t; moves to 1944 with its nightly air raids; and ends in 1941, when the probability of a long war is beginning to settle on Britons.
Fortunately for us, Waters, far from being unpublished, already has three well-received historical novels to her credit, most recently “Fingersmith,” a reputation that presumably allows her to bypass such gormless gatekeeping. For what she has produced here is a superb crystallization of the lives of several ordinary Britons – lives that, like most of ours, are not going anywhere special yet are faced with severe tests along the aimless journey.
Four unmarried women are at the center of “The Night Watch”; three of them – Julia, Kay and Helen – engage serially in homosexual affairs. The fourth woman, Viv, is involved with Reg, a married man. The affairs are important to the women and the novel, but do not overshadow its chief concern, which is the pressure that war puts upon love, whether familial or romantic.
The author carefully builds her war-encompassed world with sufficient but not copious period detail. Readers who recall the tottery, set-apart old house in the Alec Guinness movie “The Ladykillers” will recognize its twin in the house that Kay rooms in, with its “airless, flannel-like atmosphere,” owned by Mr. Leonard, a Christian Science “healer,” sitting in his rooms “hunched and watchful, sending out his fierce benediction into the fragility of the night.”
The milieu of the first (1947) section is reminiscent of early Muriel Spark – “The Bachelors” and “The Girls of Slender Means,” and their characters, mundane yet somehow mysterious. Sidewalks that “are dusty in the way, say, that a cat’s coat is dusty, when it has lain for hours in the sun” could as easily have run through Spark’s novels as they do through this one.
If there is mystery it is because of Waters’ working backward in time. We encounter the consequences of actions and behavior before we learn their origins. This makes the reader work harder, to the extent of having to flip back through earlier pages, but rewards the effort in greater understanding.
Only gradually do we realize why Kay is haunted by wartime bombing horrors: She had worked the night watch in ambulance rescue. This brought her in contact with Helen, who became her lover – and later the lover of Julia, who previously had been Kay’s lover.
Wartime rescue also brought Kay in contact with Viv. What is the significance of the ring that Viv, in 1947, is so feverish to return to Kay, when she catches sight of her for the first time since the war? Was it Kay’s ring? Or Reg’s?
And Viv’s sensitive younger brother, Duncan, seeing “himself … as a kind of oddity or fraud” – why was he in prison? Was it, as we suspect, for being a conscientious objector, like his cellmate, Fraser? Or is something more sinister going on, as we also suspect?
To Viv, hiding a secret that proves nearly fatal to her, “the burden of so many secrets, so much caution and darkness and care, seemed unbearable.”
As for the lesbian relationships among Kay, Helen and Julia (and others), there is a sense of drift, of regret for the need (in the 1940s) for furtiveness, and of acknowledgment of youthful allure and later-life drawbacks. It should be added that few writers, male or female, have written about sexual love with Waters’ deft combination of explicitness and delicacy.
“The Night Watch” is a book that takes fleeting, seemingly unimportant moments and uses them to illuminate the meaning of an entire human existence. Other, more expansive moments – the air raids, a post-
abortion disaster – are vividly rendered. Only one scene – preparations for a suicide that seem almost larky – does not ring entirely believable.
So, a word of wisdom about novels that “don’t seem to go anywhere”: Remember, it’s the journey, not the goal.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
The Night Watch
By Sarah Waters
Riverhead, 425 pages, $24.95
