The Night Watch

a novel
by

Sarah Waters

(Riverhead Books, 450 pages, $25.95)

reviewed by

Thornton Sully

Romance has a shelf-life.
London has become Hitler’s dartboard, and the normal causes of love’s demise—jealousy, infidelity, unfulfilled expectations, or just plain burn-out—are all trumped by the knowledge that at any moment the ordinance from the bloated belly of a bomber could be spiraling downward upon the object of your desires, or, even, yourself.
There is no twenty-five-words-or-less synopsis for Sarah Waters’s plot-less tale, The Night Watch.  The story unknots the coarse hemp and manila that binds together the lives and loves of several young adults who endure The Blitz-Kreig of London in World War Two.  Waters has chosen to work backwards in time, when the relationships literally forged in fire have cooled.  It is 1947, and the continuing lives of war-time friends and lovers are more or less spent.  They have become passive and self contained, and guarded. Waters banks that we will be curious as to how they got to be the way they are, but for those who cannot immediately identify with any particular citizen of her novel, the hints of great secrets in their past evoke only the mildest curiosity.
In order to be truly interested in the secrets, we have to be truly interested in her characters.  Here is where the accomplished author has gambled, leaving each reader to decide for themselves if there is a pay-off.  Rather than pulling us in by the actions that exposed, defined and more importantly, animated her players, Waters chooses instead to give us still life portraits embellished only slightly by their interactions, after the major dramas in their lives have already expired, and along with it much of their passion.
Thank God there’s a war.  Her somber characters are at last encaffeinated as Waters brings on the Blitz.  At once her Londoners have the purpose that eventual victory and peace usurps.  Her depiction of London under siege is as brilliant as the flames that incinerate the ashened sky, and is by design or by accident a metaphor for souls under siege.
Except that under siege her lesbian characters enjoy an acceptance or at least a tolerance that is rescinded once the war is over.  Their heroics no longer count for anything:
“’Don’t you know the war’s over? ‘ the man behind the counter in a baker’s shop asked Kay.
He said it because of her trousers and hair, trying to be funny; but she heard this sort of thing a thousand times, and it was hard to smile…He handed over the bag, saying, ‘There you are, madam.’  But he must have given some sort of look behind her back because, as she went out, the other customers laughed.”
Mickey, her comrade and fellow ambulance driver during the war, is reduced from that much revered status to become a much unnoticed pumper at the petro-pub, barely able to get permission for a few extra minutes to catch up with Kay over lunch.
“’Look at me, Mickey!’ (Kay) said.  ‘Look at the creature I’ve become!  Did we really do those things—you and I, when the war was on?  Sometimes I can’t bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings. We carried stretchers, for God’s sake!  I remember lifting’–she spread her hands–’I remember lifting the torso of a child…What the hell happened to me, Mickey?’”
Hell is, in fact, what happened to her and her fellow inhabitants of The Night Watch.  The mosaic of relationships that Waters presses upon the printed page is made from the blood stained glass combed from the rubble of blitzed London.  We are tempted to touch it just to see if it is as sharp as it looks.  While her women characters fare well in this kind of portraiture, her male characters, regardless of sexual orientation, are all defective, but in ways that alienate rather than inspire our compassion.  They are without nobility. One abandons his lover rather than have to explain details of a “miscarriage” to the authorities.  Another, from his upper prison bunk, spatters the issue of his loins during an interlude in the bombing upon his very tepid homosexual cell-mate. Other males are stodgy, dogmatic and repressed.  The distilled impression that is left, intentional or not, is that heterosexual males are not capable of investing the same sincerity and depth in a love relationship as their lesbian counterparts because there is no depth or sincerity.
Dismay not.  That debatable perception may be lost in the debris of London wreckage.   There is a scene in which a crew must dig through the rubble after a bombing run, and rather than discovering another body, salvage a life.  Similarly there is a bit of rubble on the surface of The Night Watch, but claw through that and what is unearthed is well worth getting your fingernails dirty.

(Thornton Sully is a freelance writer in North County)  800 words