Sarah Waters
THE NIGHT WATCH
480pp. Virago. £16.99 (paperback, £11.99).
1 8440 8246 6
“Why, oh why, did I ever allow the phrase ‘lesbo Victorian romp’ to cross my lips?” complained Sarah Waters in an interview, shortly after the publication of her previous book, the fantastically successful – and altogether fantastic – Fingersmith (2002). As she has rightly pointed out, that description only really applies to her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), a rollicking picaresque novel set in the decadent late-Victorian underworld. Her second novel, Affinity (1999), re-invents Millbank prison in the 1870s; it contains some lesbian love, and some spiritualism too, but precious little romping. Fingersmith, her third novel, is properly speaking a melodrama in the manner of Wilkie Collins, notable for its pitch-perfect pastiche, its tremendous displays of Count Fosco-like villainy, and its dastardly, fiendish, diabolical plot twists. Nevertheless, the label has stuck; and perhaps feeling pigeonholed, Waters has chosen to leave Victoriana behind her. Not only that, but from the colourful, heavily ornamented, teeming nineteenth century, she has gone straight to 1947: austerity, the ration book, and post-war anti-climax. Her impressive new novel features many of her recurring themes, such as class, love, lesbian lives, guilt, betrayal and prisons. But they all appear in a muted, unsensational form: the cross-dressing women in The Night Watch work as paramedics or in petrol stations, rather than at the music hall. And there’s not a gothic flourish or a gasp-inducing reversal in sight.
Waters is refreshingly open about how she writes her novels. She gets to know the writing of a period very well (Tipping the Velvet came out of a PhD in late-Victorian literature). She researches the social history: the fascinating stuff about how people lived, dressed, washed their teeth, had sex; what happened inside women’s prisons and private asylums. The fiction of the time gives her ideas for plot structure and motifs. In Fingersmith, the central device of putting a wife in the madhouse, the better to enjoy her fortune, comes from The Woman in White; the recurring emphasis on women’s strong and rather sinister hands in Affinity was suggested by the strange episode in Great Expectations, when Mr Jaggers shows off the hands of his housekeeper Molly – immensely powerful, “deeply seamed and scarred across and across”. Waters then digs around in the archives for juicy, entertaining details: the kind that show the period in a new but authentic-seeming light. For instance, the vintage smut in Fingersmith is historically documented. (The index of pornography that Christopher Lilly is working on is based on Henry Spencer Ashbee’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.) The cheerfully anachronistic descriptions of lesbian underworlds in Tipping the Velvet are made a bit more convincing because they are based on accounts of male homosexual circles in the 1890s.
The historical novel, since the 1960s, has been to a large extent driven by the desire to expose unofficial histories, often sexual ones, John Fowles’s examination of Victorian prostitution in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) being an important landmark. The other strategy is to flip a well-known story around, in order to put a marginalized character centre stage, giving that character the chance to tell his or her story. This is what Jean Rhys did for Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea; and what Peter Carey did with Magwitch in Jack Maggs. Waters is very much in this tradition: her sense of the periods she writes about is profound, but she also wants to reclaim them for her own agenda: to make them speak for women, and particularly gay women.
If all this makes her work sound programmatic, the beauty of her novels is that they seldom are. Tipping the Velvet was perhaps a little too obviously influenced by the kinds of ideas coming out of English departments: the notion that history, gender and sexual identity are fictive, the emphasis on cross-dressing, the theatrical, the transgressive; the same knot of ideas that occasionally presses down heavily on Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. But Waters is too interested in storytelling, and too good at it, to get very bogged down. Her individual scenes are filled out with a kind of hallucinatory vividness. Like Dickens, she uses caricature brilliantly, as a way of expressing character rather than a straitjacket for it – but her prose style is usually nearer Collins’s, relatively unadorned, with few of the faux-period curlicues that are the stock-in-trade of many modern historical novelists. At her best, as in Fingersmith, she builds plots which are gripping and which can convincingly accommodate the kind of stories she wants to tell. She is good at conveying interesting facts to modern audiences, without destroying the historical illusion. This isn’t easy: a large part of the historical novel’s attraction comes from the set design, the romance of period detail and antiquated language; but it cannot be too obtrusive. When Waters drops in a bit of thieves’ slang or explains how sovereigns were sweated to take gold off them, it seems completely natural.
I would guess that the germ from which The Night Watch originally sprang was Radclyffe Hall’s short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself”. Published in the early 1930s, it tells the tale of a mannish woman who has no interest in marrying or romance, who thrives during the First World War as the leader of an ambulance corps on the Western Front, but afterwards finds herself more of a misfit than ever. Kay, the first character encountered in the new novel, was also an ambulance woman, on the Pimlico night watch during the Second World War. Two years into peace, she is living in a rickety house in Lavender Hill, surrounded by bombsites. Dressed in a man’s shirt and tailored slacks, she wanders the streets in a desolate way; she is often mistaken for a “good-looking youth”, and she occasionally buys a drink for a pretty girl. Another of the novel’s main characters, Duncan, escorts his elderly friend Mr Mundy to see Kay’s landlord Mr Leonard, a Christian-Scientist healer. Duncan likes seeing Kay: “He thought she might once have been a lady pilot, a sergeant in the WAAF, something like that; one of those women, in other words, who’d charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over”. Kay, like many of her friends, has ambiguous feelings about the peace. All the characters are to some degree alienated from the great national story of the War: the Blitz spirit, Churchill, D-Day, the 1945 Labour Government and all that. (Alongside the various non-fiction sources that Waters lists, with titles like Do March in Step Girls: A Wren’s story, Spam Tomorrow, and Just Take Your Frock Off: A lesbian life, is one called You, You & You!: The people out of step with World War Two.) Duncan dreads being called up, and spends most of the war in prison; his cellmate Fraser is a conscientious objector; on their wing at Wormwood Scrubs, prisoners call out to the German bombers, because the lags have their sentences reduced if they are bombed. Duncan’s sister, Viv, a glamour girl with “a layer of grief, as fine as ash, just beneath the surface”, falls in love with a married man, partly because of his humorous disenchantment with the war:
“He went on like this, telling her about his duties at the camp, the hopeless squaddies he was billeted with, the hopeless pubs and hotel bars, the hopeless weather . . . . He made her laugh. The boys she met, of her own age, were full of the war: they wanted to talk about types of aeroplane and ship; about Army bets and Navy quarrels. He was past all that.”
Structurally, Anthony Powell would seem to be an important influence on The Night Watch. The novel’s four main characters are linked by a series of incidental connections and chance encounters: Viv works at an introduction agency with Helen, who happens to have been involved with Kay, who meets Viv by chance, when she’s having a drink with Fraser, who was in prison with Duncan. The important difference is that, in Waters’s hands, the dance to the music of time goes backwards: her story starts in 1947, then cuts back to 1944, before ending at its beginning in 1941.
As usual, Waters does great work with resonant detail, from the varnish painted onto windows to stop them splintering in the bomb blasts, to the subtle codes that lesbians use to communicate with each other in public. Her set-pieces are vivid and fascinating, whether it is a description of a bombing raid, or just a drive out of London into Essex two years after the war. Her dialogue avoids wartime cor-blimeys and jolly-good-shows, giving all the main characters an individual way of talking, while retaining a satisfactory period flavour: “‘I shan’t want a flighty sort of woman,’ the man was saying. ‘I had enough of that sort of thing with my last girl, I don’t mind telling you’”. It must be said, though, that some of Waters’s fans may find the defiantly unglamorous mood of The Night Watch a little disappointing. There’s less about black market spivs, women spies and louche parties in the Blitz than one might have hoped.
Her prose is always precise and perceptive, but it’s certainly not a virtuoso performance as in Fingersmith. For some tastes, the whole project might be a little close to those blowsy middlebrow novels about strong women living through times of picturesque historical turbulence. But it works very well. The austerity is clearly appropriate; the models for her prose are writers such as Elizabeth Taylor, Noel Streatfeild and Elizabeth Bowen, rather than Dickens and Wilkie Collins. The story seems to be rooted in real lives rather than generic conventions.
Where she does excel, as ever, is in the plotting. Plot is something of a lost art these days: serious writers often seem to be divided between those who, like W. G. Sebald, disdainfully avoid what he called the “grinding noises” of complex narrative – and those, Ian McEwan for instance, who screech wildly through the gears. With one exception – the conclusion of Duncan’s story is abrupt and unconvincing – the story of The Night Watch is brilliantly done. As it moves backwards through time, it answers the questions raised in the first scenes, like a detective story: that’s how Duncan got to know Mr Mundy, the reader thinks; that’s why Viv gives Kay a ring when they meet in the Strand. This is not to say that it’s gimmicky. On the contrary, the way Waters traces the different love affairs from their sour aftermaths to their hopeful beginnings is extremely poignant. It is also emblematic of the world she is describing. At Helen’s agency, bereaved women and returning servicemen who find their wives or girlfriends changed beyond recognition seem to be looking for “new loves, but often – or so it seemed to her – only really wanted to talk about the loves that they had lost”.
Kay likes to sit in the cinema all afternoon, watching the second half of films first; she remarks, in what could be the epigraph to this accomplished and moving novel, “I almost prefer them that way – people’s pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures”.
