Product Description

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners-three women and a young man with a past-whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94832 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594482304
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Waters begins Night Watch at the end of her tale in 1947 and works her way backwards to 1941. Since she ensures that characters don't spoil the freshness of earlier events by leaking important information, the first part includes a series of conversations that coyly allude to the characters' pasts and make the narrative slightly difficult to comprehend. The feat of entering this tale aurally is compounded by having to follow three separate narrative lines, which Waters later connects with clever Dickensian precision. Juanita McMahon performs the work persuasively. What she lacks in vocal range, she makes up by endowing characters with accents and speech patterns to reflect distinctions of social class. She gives the character Kay's voice such deep Dietrich-like sexual innuendo that one wonders why her lovers abandon her. Recorded Books politely reminds listeners which disk they have started and repeats the last sentence of the previous. Both are welcome features. Despite the initial challenge, Night Watch is a skillfully written historical account of love of all persuasions trying to survive the dark prospects of London during the blitz.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
In the fall of 1947, an androgynous woman walks aimlessly through the scarred streets of London, adjusting her cufflinks. An ambulance driver during the Blitz, she now does nothing more dramatic than go to the cinema, arriving midway through a film and watching the second half first—"People's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures." Likewise, this historical novel begins at the end and moves backward, tracing the lives of its characters from peacetime Britain to the early years of the war. The centerpiece of the book is set in 1944, when the characters come fully alive, creeping through blackout London—an apocalyptic landscape of rubble and ash, searchlights and fires. Waters, acclaimed for her Victorian-era romps, has done meticulous research, and renders wartime scenes with unnerving authenticity.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
Over the past several years, English writer Sarah Waters has captured a corner of the market with a genre she created, the "Victorian lesbian romp." Beginning with male impersonators in the music-hall world in Tipping the Velvet and continuing with charlatan psychics in Affinity, Waters graduated to the full-blown Victorian sensation novel in the Booker Prize-nominated Fingersmith. It featured -- along with swapped babies, misplaced wills, wrongful imprisonment and characters with names like Mrs. Sucksby -- a mid-book twist so fiendish that ambushed readers flipped backward and forward as they read, trying to locate terra firma. While some dismissed Fingersmith as a sub-Wilkie Collins pastiche, others felt Waters had managed to write a Victorian entertainment that appeals to a modern audience, primarily through harnessing our sympathies to characters sexually out of step with their society and more in sync with our own more permissible one. It was not always obvious that lesbian protagonists could front bestsellers, yet they have; and in perhaps the clearest indication of establishment acceptance that an English novelist can expect, both Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were made into BBC costume dramas.

Rather than continue to mine this rich vein, however, with her fourth novel, The Night Watch, Waters has moved outside some of her comfort zones. The novel is set in London during World War II and its aftermath rather than the Victorian period, and it's told in the neutral third person rather than the flashier, sometimes wearying ventriloquism of first-person narration. Waters's style is different, too, dispensing with melodrama to match the rationed, austere wartime lives of her characters with clean spare prose. She still plays structural tricks, though, as she did with the dual narration of Fingersmith: The Night Watch is told backward, starting after the war in 1947, jumping back to the bombings of 1944 and finishing mid-Blitz in 1941.

The novel follows the stories of four overlapping characters: Kay, who dresses mannishly, wanders London and works as an ambulance driver on the night watch during the bombings; Helen, who lives with her writer lover, Julia; Viv, who is involved with a married soldier; and Duncan, who lives in dubious circumstances with his "Uncle Horace" and served a prison sentence during the war. Gradually, we uncover connections between the characters: Duncan and Viv are brother and sister; Viv and Helen work in the same postwar dating agency; Helen met her current lover through Kay; Kay once helped Viv in a crisis. Deciphering these connections can be satisfying -- in particular, the story behind Viv and Kay's exchange of a gold ring -- but at times they feel a little schematic. Coincidence sits more easily within a Dickensian plot than a sober war drama.

The center of the book involves a triangular flowchart of unrequited love among Kay, Helen and Julia and the consequences of their expectations and choices. What gives these choices their piquancy is that we already know the outcome and so can wince at each blunder and misunderstanding. In particular, we uncover what has made the enigmatic, heartbroken Kay "one of those women . . . who'd charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over." All of the narrative strands are eventually pulled together over one evening during the mini-Blitz, with each character's fears surfacing and lives changing as the bombs fall. The Night Watch is especially good at the drama and brutality of these bombings, following Kay and her colleagues as they help the wounded and dying, at times collecting body parts, trying to bring order to the chaos.

Waters has made a flawless leap from the Victorian era to World War II. It is far more daunting to write about a well-documented era that many people still remember than a distant period whose details can be blurred and guessed at. Waters has said she wanted to avoid the World War II clichés of rationing cards and women drawing stocking lines up their calves; nor are there American soldiers handing out chewing gum or housewives saving up their rationed butter and eggs to make cakes. Instead, we get a realistic account of the uncomfortable tedium of wartime life, with an accumulation of period detail that feels both authentic and unforced. Everything in daily life is recycled, saved and accounted for, from the constantly mended clothes to the tinned meat and bobby pins Viv gratefully receives as gifts from her lover Reggie. In particular, Waters gets just right the paraphernalia people use as props to maintain some semblance of control when the world is literally falling apart around them. The women constantly reapply face powder and lipstick, determined to keep up their appearance. And everyone smokes, using cigarettes as a currency for small comfort and camaraderie.

The backwards structure of The Night Watch is its most intriguing characteristic, and also its Achilles' heel. It creates its own sort of reverse suspense, emphasizing the question of why rather than what happens and making us grow more knowledgeable as the characters become more ignorant. However, it also has a built-in flaw: We see the damage wartime events have caused before we really care enough about the characters to be moved. The postwar section, which by definition is less dramatic, takes up a full third of the book, and it drags somewhat, the way continued rationing must have after the war (rationing did not end in England until 1954). The 1947 section contains myriad lacunae that are only filled by the novel's end.

When I finished The Night Watch, I went back and reread the first third; only then did certain comments make sense. For instance, during a break at work, Viv and Helen are discussing the war, and Viv says: "I used to look forward to peace, to all the things I'd be able to do then. I don't know what I thought those things would be. I don't know what I thought would be different. You expect things to change, or people to change; but it's silly, isn't it? Because people and things don't change. Not really. You just have to get used to them."

Only later, when we know what Viv and Reggie have been through together, do we really understand the import of that sentiment. Similarly, Helen talks about the idea of happiness being rationed so that when you've got some, "you start thinking about the person who's had to go without so that you can have your portion." Her comment has far more impact when applied to her relationship with Kay than as an abstract thought, but how many readers will be willing to reread this first, morning-after section to appreciate its subtleties?

Despite these shortcomings, The Night Watch is a sophisticated, beautifully written novel by a writer who has reached her maturity. To achieve it, Waters has sacrificed some of the youthful exuberance that made her first three novels such a joy to read. While applauding her talent, I miss the romp.

Reviewed by Tracy Chevalier
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Women in Wartime
"We never seem to love the people we ought to; I can't think why." These words, spoken by one of the central characters near the end of this sensitive book, might well serve as the epigraph for the whole. As a love story, it is passionate and true, but untidy because it is true; the truth and awkwardness go hand in hand, both beautifully reconciled by Sarah Waters' unusual narrative method. The novel traces the changing emotional relationships among a group of women (plus a few men) whose lives intersect in London during the two main periods of the Blitz, in 1941 and 1944. So completely do we get to know these characters that it is tempting to talk about them as though already conversant with their backgrounds. But one of the joys of Sarah Waters' storytelling is the manner in which she reveals information piece by piece, starting after the War and working backwards. It would be a shame to spoil this pleasure for a new reader.

But one can at least quote the opening sentence: "So this," said Kay to herself, "is the sort of person you've become: a person whose clocks and wrist-watches have stopped, and who tells the time, instead, by the particular kind of cripple arriving at her landlord's door." The year is 1947, and Kay appears as a casualty of war, living alone in a declining area of South London, in a poky flat in the house of a faith healer. Yet we shall soon glimpse a different Kay: a woman of elegance and style, performing almost daily acts of heroism in her wartime work, and responsible for many of the epiphanies of grace which illuminate this story of a dark period.

The book has three sections: the first, set in 1947, is 175 pages in the paperback edition; the second, set in 1944, is the longest at 290 pages; the third, set in 1941, is only 50 pages. Reading it is rather like going to the movies in those days, picking up in the middle of the feature, then watching the program round again to discover how it all began. It has the advantage of heading towards two different kinds of ending simultaneously: there is the ending of each chronological section, and there is the ending of the book as a whole. The endings in the 1947 section are mostly hopeful but never pat, all utterly believable, and untidy as true things generally are. This is mostly the case with the 1944 section as well. Two of the three short episodes in the concluding 1941 section, however, are bright as a button; descriptions of how the characters first met, they are crisp and compact because they shine with possibility unshaded by subsequent events. The third 1941 episode describes an event that has been glimpsed as a shadow over in the life of the main male character, Duncan, now brought into the light for the first time. If there had been any doubt as to the wisdom of Waters' narrative method, the bracing cocktail of these last fifty pages triumphantly dispels it.

But no matter how she chooses to tell it, I would read any Sarah Waters novel for her portrayal of women. There is a reality to these women that is rare even among female writers. We share the author's understanding of their social lives, their work, their friendships deep or casual, their emotional needs, even their bodies. It is no surprise that most of the relationships in this love story are lesbian ones. But I found none of the difficulty I encountered with the homosexuality in Alan Hollinghurst's THE LINE OF BEAUTY (another recent Man Booker finalist), because the relationships that Waters describes are all emotional ones first, and her rare descriptions of physical sex are the natural outcome of an intimacy of the feelings. Even reading as a man, I don't find myself watching the characters from outside (still less with any prurient fascination), but experiencing with them as I recall the emotional roller-coaster of my own youth.

I called this a love story, and it is. But looking back at it, I feel it is very much more a friendship story, set against a remarkably convincing portrayal of a particular time and place. Perhaps wartime pressures both highlight simple acts of kindness and make them more necessary. There are many such things in this book, extending to the minor characters as well as the major ones, and they give a richness to the intertwined lives that are portrayed in it. When these connections between one human being and another lead to love, it is almost irrelevant whether that love is emotional or physical, hetero- or homosexual. For this, as its unusual form makes clear, is a novel about beginnings, emotional journeys, and stops along the way. It is not to be confined by mere endings.

Night Watch
An interestingly structured account of several characters in 1940's London.

Waters starts with the present and works backward, illuminating the present situation, which appears innocuous and even shallow at first, by showing what happened in the past. The present gains depth, and even a touch of horror, as we see the jealous lover who betrayed someone to be with the person whose absences she now violently suspects, and the continued relationship between a woman and the man who abandoned her as she fought for her life.

It's an interesting plot structure, and the fact that it naturally lessens tension is somewhat made up for by the ugly depths that we learn lie behind our initial picture. Dramatic individual scenes keep the immediate interest level fairly high.

Having loved all three of Waters' previous novels, though, I was disappointed by this. It was impossible to sympathize with most of the characters, not because they were weak or venal (they were) but because they were boring. Their concerns seemed mundane and their personalities unremarkable. In addition, strangely precious dialogue had a jarring effect and made it hard to take the narrative seriously at times.

Very good, but not her best.
i'll keep this short: the story is interesting, the characters are well crafted, the descriptions have depth, but there is no heart to this story. the first thing that struck me is her language - in previous novels she stunned me with her words. this is much more bland. maybe its because of the time period and events that she is portraying, but i miss reading sentences that rocked me like a blow. if you are a fan, it is a must read. if you are new to her, try her first three so you can see her at her best.