Night Watch Sarah Waters

Night Watch Sarah Waters

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with it is 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 modify irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.

From Publishers WeeklyWaters 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 initial share includes a series of conversations that coyly allude to the characters’ pasts and make the narrative somewhat difficult to comprehend. The feat of entering this tale aurally is compounded by having to follow three distinguished 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 reputation 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 original challenge, Night Watch is a skillfully written historical account of love of all persuasions attempting to survive the dark chances of London for the duration of the blitz.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New YorkerIn the fall of 1947, an androgynous woman walks aimlessly through the scarred streets of London, adjusting her cufflinks. An ambulance driver for the duration of the Blitz, she now does not one thing more dramatic than go to the cinema, arriving midway through a film and looking at 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 it is characters from peacetime Britain to the early years of the war. The centerpiece of the book is set in 1944, when the characters come entirely 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 Bookmarks MagazineShaking off the reductive expected values of her self-described “lesbian Victorian romp[s],” Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith,Sarah Waters proves she’s no one-trick pony with The Night Watch. This doesn’t come as a surprise to the critical colloquy, which paints Waters as a vigorous writer whose books wear their tireless exploration elegantly. The Oregonian goes so far to call The Night Watch “a writer’s field guide to creating rich characters in fiction.” Critics even applaud her transition to a third-person narrator. The only wobble is Waters’ decision to tell the story in reverse. For a few critics the hazardous narrative device robs the book of it is suspense, but in the final tally most writers agree that the view from the other end of the telescope is “an refined and tasteful and unfathomed device” (Guardian).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Night Watch Sarah Waters Photo

Night Watch Sarah Waters Image

Night Watch Sarah Waters Photo

Night Watch Sarah Waters Picture

Most helpful client reviews

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Women in Wartime
By Roger Brunyate
“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 sensible book, might well serve as the epigraph for the whole. As a love story, it is ardent and true, but untidy because it is true; the truth and awkwardness go hand in hand, both beautifully reconciled by Sarah Waters’ strange narrative method. The novel traces the altering aroused relationships amidst a group of women (plus a few men) whose lives intersect in London for the duration of 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 with regards to them as though already conversant with their backgrounds. But one of the joys of Sarah Waters’ storytelling is the manner in which she reveals data 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 may 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 peculiar 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 dissimilar Kay: a woman of elegance and style, performing closely every day acts of heroism in her wartime work, and responsible for galore of the epiphanies of grace which illumine 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 vantage of heading towards two dissimilar 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 largely hopeful but never pat, all perfectly believable, and untidy as unfeigned things in general are. This is for the most part the case with the 1944 division as well. Two of the three short sequences in the concluding 1941 section, however, are bright as a button; descriptions of how the characters introductory met, they are crisp and compact because they shine with possibleness 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 primary 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 part the author’s understanding of their social lives, their work, their friendships deep or casual, their aroused 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 difficultness I ran into with the homosexuality in Alan Hollinghurst’s THE LINE OF BEAUTY (another recent Man Booker finalist), because the relationships that Waters describes are all aroused 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 looking at the characters from outside (still less with any prurient fascination), but experiencing with them as I recall the aroused 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 versus a outstandingly convincing portrayal of a peculiar time and place. Perhaps wartime pressures both spotlight simple acts of benignity and make them more necessary. There are a great deal of 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 amidst one humane being and another lead to love, it is closely beside the point whether that love is aroused or physical, hetero- or homosexual. For this, as it is strange form makes clear, is a novel with regards to beginnings, aroused journeys, and stops along the way. It is not to be confined by mere endings.

73 of 84 humans found the following review helpful.
Night Watch
By K. Freeman
An interestingly structured account of assorted characters in 1940′s London.

Waters starts with the present and works backward, illuminating the present situation, which appears innocuous and even shoal 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 kinship amongst 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 more or less made up for by the ugly depths that we learn lie behind our basi picture. Dramatic person scenes keep the prompt interest level somewhat high.

Having loved all three of Waters’ former novels, though, I was disappointed by this. It was totally unlikely to sympathize with most of the characters, not because they were weak or venal (they were) but because they were boring. Their worries seemed routine and their personalities unremarkable. In addition, queerly precious dialog had a jarring effect and made it hard to take the narrative severely at times.

19 of 20 persons found the following review helpful.
Very good, but not her best.
By Mona
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 initial thing that struck me is her language – in former novels she stunned me with her words. this is much more bland. perchance it is because of the time amount of time 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, undertake her primary three so you may see her at her best.

See all 93 client reviews…