Author: Sarah Waters
Title: The Night Watch
Year of publication: 2006
Page count: 506
Rating: ★★★★
Sarah Waters is a master of (queer) character-driven historical novels, and The Night Watch is no exception—intimate, compelling, immersive storytelling, with just one little structural quirk: Instead of telling a linear story, the three sections go back in time rather than forward.
We begin in London, in 1947, and meet a small group of characters—the narration switches between three women and a young man: Kay, Helen, Viv, and Duncan. Initially, their relationship to each other is unclear, as are the reasons for their current situations; all they have in common is that they are in some way marked by having lived through the war. By virtue of the unorthodox timeline, rather than finding out what happens to the characters, we are instead shown, against the backdrop of the Blitz, what events made them the people they have become.
“How long did they have to go on, letting the war spoil everything? They had been patient, all this time. They’d lived in darkness. They’d lived without salt, without scent. They’d fed themselves little scraps of pleasure, like parings of cheese. Now she became aware of the minutes as they passed: She felt them, suddenly, for what they were, as fragments of her life, her youth, that were rushing away like so many drops of water, never to return.”
As the fragmented story progresses backwards in time, we slowly learn how their lives intertwine, and Waters manages to keep the tension remarkably taut with subtle twists and slow revelations. It’s an ambitious, clever approach, but I’m of two minds about how successful it really is—the execution is both rewarding and frustrating in equal measure. Intellectually, as a literary experiment, I really loved how the backward structure subverts the way we think about character development, and how reading the ending first gives the rest of the story a strange, sad sense of premonition. At the same time, that’s precisely this approach’s flaw: We started at the end, and the characters are left exactly where we first meet them.
If the narrative were to unfold chronologically, this novel probably would not have made the Man Booker Prize Shortlist. A small part of me wondered whether the backwards structure was just a gimmick to hide the fact that all four narratives are left unfinished, but having read all of Waters’ other novels, I know that she excels at endings, so I squashed that uncharitable thought; the lack of resolution is a deliberate choice. If you’re the sort of reader who needs a nice epilogue to tie loose ends together, then The Night Watch is not the book for you, but if you read for the pleasure of language, atmosphere, and a narrative’s unfurling, then it’s up there with Waters’ best: Captivating in all its vivid historical detail and the seeming effortlessness of her confident yet understated prose.
“Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful as she felt now, for moments like this, in a world that had atomic bombs in it—and concentration camps, and gas chambers? People were still tearing each other into pieces. 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 the 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?”
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