The Night Watch – Sarah Waters (2006)

 

Liking a WW2 novel as I do, I chose The Night Watch for my 2006 slot of A Century of Books. I have only read one other Sarah Waters novel – Fingersmith, but that was ten years ago. The Night Watch is very different to that novel – but just as compelling. So often I seem drawn to small novels and this was quite a chunky book at something like 500 pages– though I read it on my kindle. I really enjoyed the way Sarah Waters writes, characters are well drawn, and the period detail is spot on. I shall certainly read more; The Paying Guests has been recommended to me by several people.

“The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger, make a ‘character’ of yourself. It was tiring, sometimes, when you hadn’t the energy for it; that’s all.”

The narrative is told backwards, beginning in 1947 and moving back to 1941 – the beginning of the story. If that sounds confusing – fear not – it isn’t – everything holds together really well. I found myself compelled to read on quickly, to find out what significance things referred to in 1947 had in the past, it’s a very clever and effective way of telling a story.

It is the story of four women, and one young man, their war, their loves and griefs. Sarah Waters tells a story of dark, wartime nights, as bombs rain down on London. It is a story of a time when all the rules changed – for a while at least – a time when women who looked a bit like men and drove ambulances or carried stretchers were not so remarked upon. A time of prejudice and illicit love affairs. It was a time of death, destruction and fear in the long watches of the night. Everyone was changed, war left a terrible legacy all over the world.

“There was still murder, starvation, unrest, in Poland, Palestine, India—God knew where else. Britain itself was sliding into bankruptcy and decay. Was it a kind of idiocy or selfishness, to want to be able to give yourself over to trifles: to the parp of the Regent’s Park Band; to the sun on your face, the prickle of grass beneath your heels, the movement of cloudy beer in your veins, the secret closeness of your lover? Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn’t you, precisely, to preserve them? To make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came?”

Kay is in her late thirties, she drove ambulances during the war, now she watches out the window of her room or walks miles around London, nursing her own sadness. She dresses in mannish clothes, walking with a swagger that belies her inner turmoil. With the war over and obviously alone, it seems Kay no longer has a place in the world, as she walks the war-scarred streets she seems to be searching. Those around her watch her with concern, like Mr Leonard her landlord.

“He must have supposed she haunted the attic floor like a ghost or a lunatic. He was right, in a way. For sometimes she walked restlessly about, just as lunatics were said to. And other times she’d sit still, for hours at a time—stiller than a shadow, because she’d watch the shadows creeping across the rug. And then it seemed to her that she really might be a ghost, that she might be becoming part of the faded fabric of the house, dissolving into the gloom which gathered, like dust, in its crazy angles. A train ran by, two streets away, heading into Clapham Junction; she felt the thrill and shudder of it in the sill beneath her arms.”

Helen, pretty and liked it seems by everyone is nursing a personal secret. Now she is living with mystery writer Julia, who she is in love with, but Helen’s love is infused with jealousy. During the war Julia sorted through the rubble of destroyed homes, picking over the debris of shattered lives. Helen and Viv work in a match making agency, for people who have lost their loves during the war and want to start again. Needy and insecure, Helen considers confiding in Viv while at work, but can’t quite manage to do so.

Viv is the youngest of the three women, she lives with her father, and remains stubbornly loyal to her married, soldier lover. One day she spots someone she met during the war – and sets out to bump into her again, carrying a small gold ring in her pocket.

Duncan, Viv’s brother – carries his own peculiar scars from the war, but they aren’t from battle. He is living in digs in the house of Mr Mundy and working in a candle factory. One day Robert Fraser, a face from Duncan’s past pays a visit to the candle factory. He is clearly shocked at the way Duncan has chosen to live, little realising how damaged by the past Duncan is.

As the story moves back to the beginning – the lives of these characters weave together in often surprising ways. There are tantalizing little hints throughout the novel to what has gone before – as Water’s cleverly, and subtly peels back the layers of her each of her characters – so that as the novel ends, we meet them all for the first time, and know them fully.