Night Watch

Night Watch by Sarah Waters. I've been a fan of Waters through Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith, so I eagerly sought her latest out. This is a departure for Waters, whose past novels featured characters on the fringes of Victorian society. This novel is set in London during and after World War II and is peopled with a cast of inter-related, basically middle-class, characters. The story is told backwards in time: the first section is set in 1947, the second in 1944 and the final section in 1941. I found it frustrating and confusing at times, though the meticulously detailed and descriptive writing really evoked the time and place. The war was a time when everything was heightened, and women led active and purposeful lives. After the war, everyone seemed adrift and unrooted, especially Kay, my favorite character, who was a brave ambulance driver during the blitz and who was aimless and alone afterwards.

Because Waters deliberately witheld information until the end, there were times the motivation was unclear. However, the end effect was that I wanted to immediately start over after I turned the final page, after the circumstances that led the characters to where they were at the book's start were revealed. Maybe it was just me, but I had to make an effort to stick with it, but I did feel rewarded at the end, and the characters linger with me.

Waters always features lesbian characters, and Night Watch was no exception, though the main characters also featured a woman having a hopeless affair with a married man, and that woman's brother, who was imprisoned during the war, for reasons that weren't clear until the end.