The Night Watch (Hardcover)

It makes a great deal of sense that an author fascinated by Victoriana would also fit neatly into the camp of lesbian fiction. Since the Victorian age is at once very close to our own and utterly strange-a time that directly informs contemporary culture, but which remains clouded by insistent stereotypes-it is, historically, an excellent match for the experience of lesbians in the mainstream.
British author Sarah Waters has written three Victorian-period novels in total (all with lesbian characters), the most famous being her first, Tipping the Velvet, which balanced a fabulous mixture of Dickensian details and burlesque ribaldry to create a compulsively readable narrative (and a hit BBC adaptation). Waters’s latest novel is something of a departure from the others.
In The Night Watch, Waters moves forward in time to the 1940s. Three women and one man, each living to varying degrees beneath society’s radar, attempt to find love in war-ravaged London. Kay, Helen, and Viv hold odd jobs, doing their part to support the war effort, while Duncan serves time in prison for what he did with “that boy Alec.” This is a war novel that never leaves English soil. Waters is a master of the domestic, but domestic is too wimpy a word-her descriptions of daily life, freighted with unbearable loads, could draw tears from the stoniest reader. She makes us love her characters with the same deep intimacy that readers love, say, Pip in Great Expectations. The minutae, historical or personal, are always picture-perfect (as much a credit to her studious research as her imaginative powers).
This is not what one might slot away as “historical lesbian fiction”. Indeed, the most dramatic, most heart-wrenching section of the novel involves a heterosexual pair. It’s the day after a botched abortion: “He stood in the bathroom doorway, as pale as ash: biting his fingernails, too awed by the old lady to come in. If only he’d come and hold my hand, Viv thought. If only he’d put his arm around me . . . ”
What drives the narrative more than any particular sexual politic is a grander vision of propriety’s last gasp. World War II, a time when women went to work and the remnants of Victoriana were effectively sloughed off via a global rude awakening, is represented by Waters as a time of enormous social change on the home front.
Glamorous Viv, one of Waters’s typically misguided characters, makes love with the spontaneous Reg in a bit of English wilderness near the hefty novel’s opening: “The tartan rug went up and down over their fists. Two or three times she lifted her head and looked around, still anxious.” Always, in these pages, there is a sense of some nebulous, scrutinising presence, and of its condemning gaze.
Aside from Viv, the key characters are exclusively gay or lesbian, but those monikers are never used. We see these outsider sexualities, then, at a time when polite conversation had no power to name them: “You don’t think I’m like him, though, surely?” says Fraser, who spent a stint in prison with the novel’s gay male character, Duncan. “Is that what you think? Because if you do-Well, I could give you a list of girls, you know, who could put you straight on that!” Words forever fail these characters, whose feelings are pouring out, due in large part to the ruptures caused by the war, but whose world remains (even in chaos) still strictly censorious. “It’s not-it’s not what you’re thinking,” says Viv to an inquisitive man. Always, the crossed-out words. (One woman reluctantly refers to “the whole grisly ‘L’ business”).
Form follows content for Waters, so when she speaks of gruesome things-including the aforementioned botched abortion, or the sexual abuse of young Duncan by a much older prison guard-she seems to shy away from describing them, yet she leaves us in no doubt as to what has taken place. In effect, by not stating the facts, by not naming the thing itself, she charges it with the vibrations of scandal or taboo. Here’s how she describes Duncan and his troubled relationship with his guard, Mr. Mundy:

“It was almost nothing. Duncan thought of other things. There was a picture, hanging over Mr. Mundy’s bed: a scene of an angel, safely leading children over a narrow, precipitous bridge. He’d look at that until it was over. He’d look at the complicated folds in the angel’s gown; at the children’s large, innocent-spiteful Victorian faces.”

“Innocent-spiteful” is an interesting term, and serves as a perfect description for the Victorian age. Why then does that propriety, that Victorian echo, play so heavily in a story of 1940s London? Waters is a historian as much as she is a novelist, and she knows that we never escape our histories.
The Night Watch is structured so that the action moves backward in time. Three sections-dated 1947, 1944, and 1941, respectively-shuttle us from reaction to action, with the slow-moving machinations of a mystery novel. What is Duncan’s great sin? And what is the significance of the golden ring that passes between the hands of the novel’s women?
When Duncan enjoys a beer with his prison-buddy Fraser, they discover an old clay pipe on the ground. “There must have been a man here, three hundred years ago, smoking tobacco just like you,” his friend says. “Isn’t that a funny thought?” There is a mild sort of torment in that line of thought, of course. We can never properly know the past. That longing for hidden knowledge, so like the erotic element in forbidden love, is also a clear motivator for Waters.
The past also penetrates the present, if you really appreciate it. When Helen and Kay, the novel’s central lovers, have a spat, Helen comes up with an oddly forward-thinking announcement: “I hate having to sneak and slink so grubbily about. If we could only be married, something like that.” I don’t know whether lesbians in the 1940s could realistically have been imagining the possibility of gay marriage when prison sentences were more likely absorbing their attention. But historical fiction, like its cousin, science fiction, is never really about the time it takes place. It is, ultimately, a vision of ourselves, refracted through some distant other.
The Second World War broke lives, families, and much more; terrible as it was, it also broke the bonds of a rigid (even ferociously) repressed society. “So many impossible things were becoming ordinary, just then,” says Helen of the war’s beginning. She may be referring to bombs in London streets. She may be referring to the love between two women. Both, in the 1940s, were unthinkable. And both happened.
Kay, the tomboy who most effectively breaches propriety’s bonds in The Night Watch, grows greatly excited over a cup of tea, just a short while after the war is over. “Did we really do those things we did?-you and I, when the war was on? Sometimes I can’t bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings . . . What the hell happened to me?”
Kay is referring to her wartime job as an ambulance driver. But it reads, necessarily, as an astonished shout about her hidden love, and the second, invisible war that was waged.
Michael Harris (Books in Canada)

Starred Review. Waters (Fingersmith) applies her talent for literary suspense to WWII-era London in her latest historical. She populates the novel with ordinary people overlooked by history books and sets their individual passions against the chaotic background of extraordinary times. There are Kay, a "night watch" ambulance driver; her lover, Helen; two imprisoned conscientious objectors, upper-class Fraser and working-class Duncan; Duncan's sister, Viv; Viv's married soldier-lover, Reggie; and Julia, a building inspector–cum–mystery novelist. The novel works backward in time, beginning in 1947, as London emerges from the rubble of war, then to 1944, a time of nightly air raids, and finally to 1941, when the war's end was not in sight. Through all the turmoil on the world stage, the characters steal moments of love, fragments of calm and put their lives on the line for great sex and small kindnesses. Waters's sharply drawn page-turner doesn't quite equal the work of literary greats who've already mapped out WWII-era London. But she matches any of them with her scene of two women on the verge of an affair during a nighttime bombing raid, lost in blackout London with only the light of their passion as a guide. (Mar. 23)
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