Sarah Waters’s first three novels each looked back, from a different angle, at a different decade of the Victorian age. Tipping the Velvet (1998) brought a music-hall swagger to its account of a young lesbian’s escapades in the 1880s. Affinity (1999) gave shivery resonances worthy of Emily Dickinson or Henry James to a haunting tale of spinsters and spiritualists in the 1870s. Fingersmith (2002) plunged into the lurid realm of the 1860s sensation novel. Chock-a-block with melodrama — a jeopardised heiress, incarceration in a madhouse, a menacingly isolated mansion, false identities, arrant villainy — it proved a disappointing sub-Wilkie Collins fabrication, florid and overblown.
So it’s good to find her new book, The Night Watch, advancing assuredly into fresh territory. This time, the setting is the 1940s, and Waters’s fascination with what’s gone before shows itself even in her novel’s structure. Opening in 1947, the narrative moves back through 1944 and 1941 to uncover what has brought its central characters to the situations in which we first encounter them. Excavation of casualties from bombed buildings features prominently in the story. Excavation of another kind has always been Waters’s concern as a novelist. Unearthing buried lesbian lives, existences scarcely glimpsed in 19th- century fiction, motivated her Victorian novels. Here, she spotlights covert, mainly homosexual lives in the 1940s, then delves back to disclose the happenings that have shaped and intertwined them.
Things start just after the war. London is still a shaky sprawl of wreckage but echoes to the sound of rebuilding. At Lavender Hill, upper-class Kay, a mannish shirt-and- trousers lesbian lodging in grimy rented rooms, watches damaged individuals seeking to be cured by her faith-healer landlord. Off Bond Street, Helen and Viv run a marriage bureau offering repairings of another sort to those the war has deprived of a partner. In White City, Viv’s nervy brother Duncan works in a factory set up to rehabilitate the physically and psychologically injured. Everywhere, the atmosphere is one of weariness and wariness shot through with flickers of anticipation about revived opportunities and new directions.
Wheeling back from this fatigued milieu to 1944, the novel erupts into scenes of high-adrenaline intensity: a scary trek across the shattered hinterland of St Paul’s under heavy bombing, panic in prison cells during an endless-seeming air raid (“like being trapped in a dustbin while someone beat on it with a bat”), rescue bids among smouldering ruins that suddenly flame up as if riddled by a giant poker. In this environment, Kay, sniggered at as an androgynous freak in peacetime, is in her element. One of the crew at an ambulance station largely staffed by fellow spirits, she routinely performs feats of bravery and resourcefulness. The courage, stamina, expertise and emotional control needed to drive, through hailstorms of shrapnel and debris, down nightmarishly potholed streets into the heart of an inferno where the mutilated and traumatised lie under rubble amid mangled bodies and dangerously teetering walls is conveyed with pulsing immediacy. Simultaneously, the book’s other main figures face climactic urgencies and crises of their own.
Besides extensive factual research, Waters is much assisted in the reconstruction of her vanished worlds by immersion in the literature of a period. With its solitaries and misfits trailing through shabby streetscapes, The Night Watch’s opening section recalls Patrick Hamilton’s down-at-heel chroniclings of London in Hangover Square (1941) and The Slaves of Solitude (1947). A seedy dentist/abortionist whose botchings are near fatal could have sidled in from a novel by Graham Greene. Elsewhere, the influence of Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen is perceptible. Yet it’s only in the scenario rigged up around Duncan (a character modelled on the aesthete-author Denton Welch) that things seem artificial. Resurrecting the look and sound and moods of the 1940s with uncanny skill and only the rarest wobble into anachronism (“checking out the competition”), Waters brings her pages alive with people caught in vividly believable predicaments.
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Constraint and escape always play a significant role in her plots. A high proportion of her characters are pent up in jails (in The Night Watch, Wormwood Scrubs looms as large as Millbank prison did in Affinity), trapped in locked rooms, asylums, hostile institutions, oppressive relationships and repressive circumstances. Here, pulling triumphantly free of the weight of pastiche that lumbered Fingersmith, this outstandingly gifted novelist releases her imagination into her most compelling depiction yet of women’s struggles for various kinds of liberation.
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