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1. Sarah Waters (2006), The Night Watch
Monday, 11 January 2010 22:39I really enjoyed this. It was incredibly readable, very cleverly structured, and less mannered than Fingersmith (the only other book of hers I've read). I mean, don't get me wrong - Fingersmith was also really good, and did an excellent job of parodying and subverting the tropes of Victorian literature. But it felt like a pastiche as it did so, and also inherited some of the cloying gloom of the source genre. The story and characters in this seem more genuine and easier to care about by comparison, and the whole feel of the novel is fresher and lighter - despite the inherently dark setting of London in the Second World War.
It is certainly a very vividly-told story, with lots of small details about people's mannerisms and the settings the characters inhabit, which really bring them alive and speak volumes about them alongside their main actions or dialogue. And the depth of the research that has gone into it is very obvious well before you get to the long list of acknowledgements at the back - but never feels like it is being crow-barred in or weighing down the story.
Its most unusual feature is that the three main chunks into which the story is divided are presented in reverse chronological order. First we meet and get to know the main characters after the war in 1947; then we wind back to 1944 to see what was happening to them during the later part of the war; and finally a shorter section rounds off their stories with another step backwards to 1941. Over the course of this, it becomes clear that people who know very little about one another have actually been moving in and out of the peripheries of each other's lives for years - you can trace a circle of connections between all four of the main characters, but they are only ever aware of isolated pairs of links.
The format of course creates opportunities for all sorts of backwards and forwards resonances through the story, which the readers experience in the opposite order from the characters. There is a sort of inversion of knowledge and understanding as the novel goes on - in the first part, all sorts of little details which are clearly significant to the characters are puzzling to us, but by the end of the novel we can see the full implications of small events which seem unimportant to them. And the different periods in the main characters' lives are linked together by repeated themes or motifs - damaged buildings for Kay, tea and sandwiches for Helen, windows for Duncan, toilets for Viv - which we see occur in starkly contrasting situations as their stories unfold.
Obviously, this being a Sarah Waters novel, lesbian characters are strongly featured - but she seems to be branching out a little here. Of the four main characters, two are lesbian women, but one is a gay man and the fourth is a heterosexual woman. Perhaps in keeping with the step forward she has taken in time, the lesbian characters are also much more secure in their sexuality than Waters' Victorian women usually are (as far as I can tell anyway - I only know Tipping the Velvet and Affinity through TV adaptations). This is not a novel about women (or men) discovering their sexuality, but about them living with it.
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It is certainly a very vividly-told story, with lots of small details about people's mannerisms and the settings the characters inhabit, which really bring them alive and speak volumes about them alongside their main actions or dialogue. And the depth of the research that has gone into it is very obvious well before you get to the long list of acknowledgements at the back - but never feels like it is being crow-barred in or weighing down the story.
Its most unusual feature is that the three main chunks into which the story is divided are presented in reverse chronological order. First we meet and get to know the main characters after the war in 1947; then we wind back to 1944 to see what was happening to them during the later part of the war; and finally a shorter section rounds off their stories with another step backwards to 1941. Over the course of this, it becomes clear that people who know very little about one another have actually been moving in and out of the peripheries of each other's lives for years - you can trace a circle of connections between all four of the main characters, but they are only ever aware of isolated pairs of links.
The format of course creates opportunities for all sorts of backwards and forwards resonances through the story, which the readers experience in the opposite order from the characters. There is a sort of inversion of knowledge and understanding as the novel goes on - in the first part, all sorts of little details which are clearly significant to the characters are puzzling to us, but by the end of the novel we can see the full implications of small events which seem unimportant to them. And the different periods in the main characters' lives are linked together by repeated themes or motifs - damaged buildings for Kay, tea and sandwiches for Helen, windows for Duncan, toilets for Viv - which we see occur in starkly contrasting situations as their stories unfold.
Obviously, this being a Sarah Waters novel, lesbian characters are strongly featured - but she seems to be branching out a little here. Of the four main characters, two are lesbian women, but one is a gay man and the fourth is a heterosexual woman. Perhaps in keeping with the step forward she has taken in time, the lesbian characters are also much more secure in their sexuality than Waters' Victorian women usually are (as far as I can tell anyway - I only know Tipping the Velvet and Affinity through TV adaptations). This is not a novel about women (or men) discovering their sexuality, but about them living with it.
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.
