The Night Watch

The blurbs above, from "Publishers Weekly" and "The New Yorker," give a fair summary of the characters and structure of "The Night Watch." In Sarah Waters's reverse-chronological strategy, suspense takes on a different cast: not "What is going to happen next?" but "What is the truth of what's already happened?" This tactic allows her to leave out the heavy-baggage exposition of the ordinary novel, where personae unpack, for our convenience, facts they are already over-acquainted with. Instead, you the reader are allowed, indeed challenged, to discover and piece together the pasts of the four major and five minor figures---to decode the meaning of a battered ring, or a tin of canned meat, or a pair of silk pajamas now destroyed. In fact, they are not so much "characters one can identify with" as people we become interested in for their own sakes. The pressure of war-time does not inflate them to larger than life-size; nor do they "symbolize" this or that class or message or authorial intention, any more than you or I do. Each becomes an individual whose "future"---reconsidered once we reach the end of the book in the "past"---possesses the possibility of hope, despite the dark history of their lives and times.

More than a month after finishing the novel, I caught Waters on the radio reading two scenes to an audience in Atlanta. Several instances of humor which seemed sly and understated on the page made the audience laugh outright: the book is serious, but not depressing. And hearing the scene where ambulance-driver Kay and her crew assist a family outside their bombed-out house brought back with force the story's harrowing glimpses of war, in all their gruesome unglamour. The historical moment is invoked with such vividness one might think the book contemporary with Elizabeth Bowen's classic of wartime London, "The Heat of the Day" (1949). Waters holds her own in such company, and adds a modern frankness that only enhances believability.

I promise that once you read "The Night Watch" through to the end (and it's hard to put down), you will turn back to think the whole book through again from the beginning.

Quite a gripping tale of linked characters. It opens in 1947 and we meet masculine Kay strolling through London seeming to have lost her purpose in life...odd Duncan, living with his uncle and working in a factory with a group of apparently slightly disabled people...Helen and Viv running a marriage bureau. I was immediately drawn into wanting to know their histories.
Waters works back in time; the central part of the book is 1944; the short finale 1941. The writing style put me somewhat in mind of Monica Dickens, and the world of the blitz is brilliantly evoked. All the characters are well drawn- I particularly felt the peripheral character Mickey to be really convincing.
Utterly enjoyable read.

A fabulous book and I highly recommend it. By the author's own admission it is not like her others, per se.

For one thing, while her other books take place in the 19th Century, here in The Night Watch, we are in the 20th, in the period of the 1940's, during and just after the Second World War.

We are in blacked-out London. Bombs falling everywhere. People trying to get on with their lives, in the midst.

The novel, in three parts, takes a real innovative approach to storytelling... in fact, I am not sure I have seen such a thing done before, and if I have, it must have not been as impressively done, for I forget it, now. However, I shall not soon forget what Sarah Waters created here.

Part 1 takes place in 1947.

Part 2, in 1944.

Part 3, in 1941.

Thus, we are beginning at the end of the story really, and working our way BACK, [in time] as we read.

The remarkable thing is how Waters yet maintains an element of brooding suspense, and truly that suspense is as ominous as the blacked-out streets that everyone shuttles around in, throughout the chapters. In other words, most novelists are relying upon what lies ahead in the road, counting on this as the reason the reader keeps turning pages.

But here things are reversed.

And yet!

For instance, tonight as I was finishing the last section, the final pages, there is a part where [don't worry, I won't spoil anything here] the character ______ holds a blade to his/or/her own throat and _____ [another character] watches.... and my God! The crucial moment, when you don't know what is going to happen [yet you should know, for she has already told us, in previous sections] I had to close the book [I could not turn the page for fear of what I might read there]... take a little walk around the Starbucks I was in at the time...

My conclusion? She is a genius storyteller, and deserves to be read by every conscious person!

Blacked out streets and bomb shelters.

The author tells us, "It's about people's relatively quiet but intense emotional journeys. It's about people's experiences of love, and loss, and betrayal."

Wonderfully researched. The novel completely kept me.

Waters has created scenes [one in particular], that are perhaps some of the most moving, memorable moments of my literary pilgrimage, here on this planet.

I am rating it five stars because I was in it, every step of the way........

THE NIGHT WATCH represents a new direction for the superb young British novelist Sarah Waters, as her first work in some time to eschew the machinery of the sensation novel and her first work ever not set during the Victorian period. The novel centers upon four characters in London during and just after the Second World War, whose lives are transformed by it and yet whose problems often remain (shockingly) the same. Very cleverly, Waters tells the story in three sections told in reverse chronological order to heighten our surprise at what has changed and what stands as unchanged for her characters: the first section is told in 1947; the second (and longest) during the so-called Little Blitz of 1944; and the third during the Big Blitz of 1941. Waters can certainly tell a compelling story (her pervious work writing sensation fiction has trained her narrative abilities beautifully), but it is true that the novel doesn't seem animated by ideas so much as by characters: all of them face problems with doomed love affairs and with gender and sexual stereotyping, but there's not as much of a point to the work as one might like. But it's a great read--enthralling, well-written, and with very memorable characters.

I have loved most of Sarah Waters' novels, but this is my absolute favorite. It has an emotional depth that surpasses that of her other novels.

It is not quite as "fun" as Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith, and I can see how readers looking for that sense of a rollicking good time in Victorian England would be disappointed, but I loved the departure in this novel and the melancholic nostalgia for a time of life in upheaval that can never be recaptured.

All the sadness and struggles and disappointments of love are portrayed beautifully here. I especially love the way the novelty of the backwards timeline is used, it's heartbreaking to see where "it all begins" for these sad, lost characters.

It's a beautiful, almost voyeuristic glimpe into the lives of people during a trying time in history. There are parts that are almost painful to read, especially Helen's jealousy and neurosis as she obsesses over the faithfulness of Julia, the woman she worships. It's an ugly aspect of relationships that many would rather not talk about, but there's a lot of pathos in seeing it laid so bare.

I believe there was a movie based on this, but I've never seen it, yet it feels like I have, that's how well I can picture the people and places in this book.

I really struggled with this book, although of course, I appreciate many aspects of it : its attention to detail, its minute and careful observations, Sarah Waters' forthrightness in choosing homosexual people for most of the principal rôles.

Its unusual backwards chronology is a gamble and I am not sure it pays off : there is scant sense of closure, and whatever closure there is comes at the end of the first section of the book.

For me, the major problem was with the characters : they seemed to me a dreary bunch of also-rans and, as the book is long, the reader needs to invest energy in trying to empathise. This effort, for me, did not seem worthwhile and I was relieved when I came to the end! I felt as if I had been at a party at which all the other guests were people I didn't really want to meet....

Did the recurring frequency of the word 'lavatory' strike anyone else??

This is definitely not one of Sarah Waters' most crowning achievements, when an author tries to be cheeky with timelines and the whatnot, it's a very tricky balance, one in which Waters did not accomplish in the least. She also lost tension and narrative along the way, something that I absolutely love about her talent and past works (Tipping the Velvet).
If she only would have slowed down and broken it up a bit better, I do believe the book would have ranked up their with her best.

After reading Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith I knew that I had to go hunt up her other works. This time instead of the Victorian world, the setting is that of World War II, when the bombs of the Blitz are shattering London. Waters takes the lives of a handful of people, then explores the shifting relationships between them all.

The novel opens in the year 1947. London is still mostly a ruin two years after the bombs have stopped falling. The opening scene is of a woman standing at her window, smoking; she is watching as two men come walking up to the house where she lives. One is young, the other much older and clearly not doing well. Downstairs from Kay is a Christian Scientist healer, who views that physical ailments are nothing more than the burdens that the mind carries, and uses a soothing monolog of prayer and exhoration to give relief to his patients. Kay, in the meantime, wanders the streets of London at night, nattily dressed in men?s clothing, looking -- but looking for what?

Viv and Helen run a matchmaking agency, with some success, after the war. It's not exactly satisfying work, but it does help. Helen is involved with Julia, a writer who is on the verge of making it big, and Viv is entangled with Reggie, a married man, another relationship that is evidently going nowhere.

And finally there is the relationship between Viv and her brother Duncan -- who is none other than the young man that Kay spotted from her window. We discover that Duncan has a very troubled past, and a time in prison during the war, troubles that have left him deeply disturbed and his family in shreds.

The next segment of the novel is set three years earlier, during the last devastating bombing of London. Kay is an ambulance driver who works at night, when the Germans drop their incendiaries and bombs, seeking to break the British. Kay has her circle of friends, fellow drivers and medics, and gets a surge of vitality from her work. And she has the opportunity to be with her lover, Helen, cherishing and adoring her. Yes, the same Helen who is working with Viv in the earlier part of the novel.

Viv, for her part, is working in a government ministry, trying to help those people who have been bombed out of their own homes. We see that she was still involved with Reggie, even though she knows that he has a wife and children tucked away in the country. But she holds on, hoping that somehow things will become permanent with her lover.

Duncan is in prison, a ghastly spot in London called Wormwood Scrubs. As to why he is in there, we haven't found out yet, but it's a horrible place to be. When the bombs fall near the prison turns into a mixture of fear and elation, with the inmates either screaming or cheering on the bombs. The few visits that Duncan gets from his family are grim ordeals, with only Vivien giving him any sort of comfort, and even then, it's not much.

Helen, in turn, is finding that she has more than just a passing interest in Julia, a former lover of Kay's, and it's threatening to overturn her own relationship with the vibrant, risk taking Kay.

The final segment is set in 1941, and the reader, if they've made it this far, will discover how everyone in the previous two parts of the novel acquired all of their baggage. I'm not going to reveal much more of the story here, but it does give several very surprising twists.

Instead of creating a novel with a past, present and future, or indeed any sort of plot beyond survival, Waters has given us a story of relationships. We're treated to vignettes, and characters ruminating over their past choices, and the fears of what is to come. While I certainly did find them interesting, I had a hard time feeling in touch with the various players in this story. They are just, well, surviving, a few are trying to pick up the pieces of their past, but there isn't any sort of passion here -- everyone is going through the motions, but each one is adrift in the ruins, as it were.

If you are looking for the same sort of pacing and twists that Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith had, they are not here. Indeed, the hardest thing that I had in this story was the complete lack of plot. With placing the first part in 1947, we already know that most of the people are going to be surviving World War II, and the bombing of London, so there's one big twist gone, we already know that various lovers have broken up and hooked up with someone else, and so forth. So the only thing really left is the internal, emotional world of the characters, and the vivid depiction of a society coming apart.

It's this description of a bombed, terrified London that makes the book worth reading. While it's not a particularly good novel, it's these striking word-paintings that make the story worth wading through. Sadly though, it doesn't save the book from being more than a three star read, and rather disappointing. While the life-styles of the characters and their relationships are controversial -- most of the women are caught up in lesbian affairs, Viv and Reggie are adulterers, and Duncan exists in a lonely, self-made hell -- even here, there's nothing much to really relate to.

It's a pity, as Sarah Waters is a damn fine writer, and can do much better than this. So, to sum up, it's an average read, but hard to follow in this story written in reverse. If you are particularly interested in daily life in London during the war, or in the topic of forbidden relationships, I suppose this would do. But I can't give it an honest recommend to read this one either. It all depends on your own taste in reading.

The Night Watch is a major and welcomed departure for Waters. The author moves away from her wheelhouse; Victorian-era, lesbian, bodice rippers have here to fore been her specialty. And while The Night Watch certainly is not devoid of lesbian characters, it is neither wholly preoccupied nor wholly populated by them.

The story is told in reverse chronological order, prefigured by character Kay Langrish's compulsion to see movies beginning half-way through their showing, ending her filmgoing with what was intended to be a story's beginning.

What is most interesting to me, is the way Waters' characters are a study in negative space. The privation, danger and exhiliration of the war years have settled into the stultifying routine of 1947. Nearly all of the characters lives have devolved into mere routine without a sense of purpose. The emptiness of the post-war years is a true presence in this book, nearly its own character, in fact.

The heart of the story takes place in 1944, during the second blitz. Amidst bombs dropping from the sky, there exists the more mundane brutality of every day life - a lovers betrayal, imprisonment and abortion. We learn of the events that have led to the characters post-war selves.

Waters' descriptions of emptied out neighborhoods and bombed out residences resonated deeply with this reader because of recent experiences during and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The prose was hauntingly accurate even though it was describing an utterly different catastrophe.

When the novel finally ends, at its chronological beginning, we see the events which set the story in motion: the chance meeting between future lovers and teenage angst gone off the rails.

We are left to ruminate on beginnings and ends. Kay's story begins (ends?) so full of hope and romantic heroism, yet ultimately, she is turned into the waking dead by a romantic betrayal. The same sort of romantic betrayal threatens to be the undoing of Helen. Duncan's story begins (ends?) soaked in blood yet ends (begins) with his slipping the shackles of Mr. Mundy and quite possibly escaping the imprisonment of his own making. Perhaps most hopeful of all, is the idea that Vivian may escape the awfulness of an affair long past its sell-by date.

The Night Watch is not a perfect book. Sometimes Waters characters can be thinly drawn. However this book is such a marked departure in breadth and scope from her past efforts. This book is a serious one and a great effort at untangling the complicated lives of its characters.

Historical fiction with a social relevance, WWII London from the perspective of a few common citizens, whose lives really aren't common at all. The book starts in 1947, two years after the war and works backwards to 1944 and 1941, telling the stories of the characters in reverse, which is effective because it's interesting to learn how things started after you see how they developed. The main characters are lesbians, including an ambulance driver, a novelist and another woman who falls in love with both of them. Helen is living with the ambulance driver, Kay, but falls in love with the crime writer, Julia, who had been involved with Kay in the past. The tender love scenes intersperse with the war tales, with exciting scenes of Kay at work, rescuing bomb victims and removing their corpses. Helen was one of the victims, we learn in the 1941 segment, finding out how they met after the story of their relationship has been told. The other main characters are Duncan and Viv, brother and sister, who have their own problems. Duncan is in prison, although we never really know why. It may be because he attempted suicide although at the end we find out that he witnessed his best friend's suicide and never followed through with his own, as planned. Alec committed suicide to avoid serving in the army and Duncan may have been imprisoned for being a CO (conscientioius observer). Viv's relationship with a married man, Reggie, is the only heterosexual one in the book and an abortion scene is one of the most graphic. This beautiful work of fiction tells the stories of these characters amidst the harrowing world of London in the '40s, when the everpresent threat of Nazi bombs made life unbearable. Waters has the details down, from the torches people carried to the specific streets where the bombings took place to the work that ambulance drivers like Kay had to do to save the innocents.

Sarah Waters' ability to completely transport the reader into her worlds is almost uncanny. I can't think of any contemporary writer who sets a scene with more eloquence than she does. I'm jealous of her abilities. Up until now her books have been "lesbo-victorian romps," but in "The Night Watch" she tackles WWII London.

Waters delves deep into her characters. "The Night Watch" is reminiscent of Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" in that the reader is given unhindered access into the protagonists' most minute thought processes. Waters doesn't create heroes and villains, she creates complex, flawed, and incredibly believable characters. "The Night Watch" is told in reverse narrative, which lends the whole book a certain element of tragedy- since we know the outcome already, the focus is shifted onto the actions taken themselves, rather than the costs of those actions. Because of the book's structure, even the mildest occurence carries a resonance. Oppositely, a scene in which a character faces death is no longer charged with the tension of facing death, and is instead about sacrifice, betrayal, honor....etc.

I can't wait for her next novel.

After falling in love with the gorgeously written Tipping the Velvet years ago, I have gobbled up Sarah Waters' following books as soon as I can get my hands on them. The Night Watch being no exception. I just finished about five minutes ago and took a moment to read what others had felt.

It was a good book. Absolutely. Sarah Waters can draw you in as few can-she gets it. And, not only that-she can write it too. There was a moment when she was describing the indescribable, the elusive-being in love-when I thought,"Exactly. Wow. How recognizable that is." She has a firm grasp on the human condition, regardless of class or sexual orientation. It is this that makes Sarah Waters one of my favorite writers.

Another reviewer mentioned they couldn't warm to the characters in this book. I don't agree. I found them all, with the possible exception of Duncan, to be fully fleshed out. Even Alec seemed more fully formed to me than Duncan. Perhaps that was intentional on Waters' part but he left me cold, just the same.

The reason I'm rating The Night Watch 3 stars instead of 4 or 5 is b/c, though I felt the characters were fully realized, and I felt very much in wartime London in the 40s (clearly she did tons and tons of research into the time) w/o it feeling false or quaint, and though there were moments of Sarah Waters' edge that came through, it didn't have that twist or significant denouement that I kept expecting to be on the next page. As I saw the pages dwindling, I could feel my disappointment rising. It just didn't have that gasp factor that gave her previous books that extra umph.

I remain loyal and steadfast, however. And, I will pre-order her next book. Fingers crossed, though, it's not another 3 years.

I should have read these reviews before I plunged into this book. The main problem is that any tension that might have been created by elements of the plot was totally eradicated by the flashback structure. In the first few chapters, you learn about the main characters and then you flash back to the heart of the war. But you don't have to worry about whether any of the characters will die, which characters will end up together, whether a character will survive a dangerous situation, or anything like that because you already know! And there were plenty of these potentially tense situations. But I just yawned through them knowing that everything would work out in a certain way. It's such a shame because "The Paying Guests" was very good (except for the terrible ending).

A well-told story about the intersecting lives of a man and several different women in the 1940's in London. Focusing mostly on the period when London was being bombed regularly during the war. The novel moves back in time, beginning in 1947, and ending in 1941. A story of attraction, love, tragedy, and loss. One character laments something like, "I pass people in the street and wonder 'What have you lost? And what did you do?'" As always, a thought-provoking and emotional read.

I picked up The Night Watch in the airport bookstore- and captive in my seat, the book captured me.
The story ingeniously moves backward in time from 1947 through the Blitz and WWII in London. It tells of sets of people and their differing experiences of the war and its aftermath. The facts are revealed only slowly and you'll have to pay attention to get it all. (Great escapism for a tedious flight.)
This book has some rather new things to say about the journey to know oneself and ones place in the world, and maybe after. It's a satisfying trip.

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I've enjoyed Sarah Waters previous three novels (with "Affinity" as my favorite) and was especially delighted to learn she had shifted her focus from the late 19th century to World War II London as I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile and huge WWII buff. I was so enthused, I ordered the book from the UK, to get it that much quicker. It doesn't disappoint at all in Waters' strong writing style and great attention to physical detail. Some of the most breathtaking descriptions in "The Night Watch" are of getting about bomb ravaged London either on foot or in an ambulance. You can almost hear the muffled "wumps" of bombs falling in the distance and feel the grit of dust, ash and glass on your skin. As always with Waters, the great attraction of her works are their focus on women and the even narrower exploration of lesbian lives within a fascinating historical context. As effective as Waters has always been with research, however, I did have to wonder about the accuracy of a few details. For example, one of the main characters is depicted as fairly "butch" with more than a few similar acquaintances, implying it wasn't the least bit unusual for lesbians (especially non-traditional dressers etc.) to be "out" unmolested in 1940s London. The fact that the war allowed a great many social freedoms is not really addressed by the situations or the characters which was frustrating. Could lesbians really be this casual during - and after - the war? Then, while the war looms over sections of the book (mostly in the form of endless and massive air raids), its also strangely absent in character development. Not once is there any mention (not even archly) of the "let's pull together" aspect (however stereotyped that itself may be) that many felt during the time. Then, we never learn why one character chose to be an ambulance driver or how the war affected jobs for women (what other choices did they have, etc.). An absorbing story line of a "conchy," or conscientious objector, falls a bit flat as there is absolutely no mention of the great peril Britain was in from Spring 1940 through most of 1941. Many Britains did not want to go to war in 1939 (to save the Poles or the French, as it appeared), but after the British forces were pushed off the continent, followed by the fall of the low countries, France and Belgium to Germany, England was truly alone. Invasion was a serious threat for months. Surely even a very young person would be aware of the dire situation facing the country and be torn over moral conflicts over not fighting, but this is never any issue for the "conchy." None of the other characters seem much interested in the war itself or politics, which is not unusual, per se, only in that as the war shapes their daily lives so much, wouldn't they express some thoughts about it? Perhaps my expectations were too high, but the weakness of these details keep me from rating "The Night Watch" higher. But all that said, Waters remains a terrific writer and storyteller and this is a subtle, compelling and ultimately very sad read. If you expect history to touch the characters a little more, however, you may be a bit let down.

London after, in the middle of, and at the beginning of WWII, in that order; I am awed by the beauty of the nonlinear storytelling of The Night Watch. It's a character-driven novel, and it was a breath of fresh air after all the plot-driven fiction I've been reading lately. There is something poignant about the way Waters works backward through time in this novel, the way the characters come intensely to life as they grow younger, as the reader sees who they are, knowing whom they will become. The love stories woven throughout are intense, bittersweet, and oh so close to home. No one paints a character portrait, with all its nuances, quite like Sarah Waters. I absolutely loved this.

Wow, does this author like to describe stuff. A lot. Almost stopped reading, but the plot was engaging and the author can write. And she has obviously done her homework by researching history of Britain under siege in WW2. Recommend to fans of historical fiction.

The characters are interesting, and it's a situation that doesn't get much play in fiction. I had a hard time keeping track of who the characters are - there are three different viewpoints, but they are all voiced similarly. Also I kept expecting something more to happen. Not a bad read though.

The Night Watch, nominated for Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize, has been written with an enthralling narrative gimmick. Divided into three sections, it tells the story of six characters in wartime London beginning in 1947, stepping back to 1944 and finishing in 1941. You learn where they ended up by page 150 and spend the next 300 pages finding out how they got there.

This turns the events of the story on their head in interesting ways. When one of the characters remarks during the war that "we might all be dead tomorrow," you know they won't. Their fatalism falls on deaf ears; German planes drop bombs night after night that will never find them. As a cheating husband tells his mistress "you wait until after the war ... it'll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time," you've already learned with certainty that it's an empty promise.

The story's constructed as a mystery in which the details of the characters' lives are the mystery, so describing them individually would ruin surprises. The six are ordinary people living in London, dealing with World War II and tied together by romance or coincidence. Four of the six are gay -- one newspaper reviewer claims Waters has the literary goal of "writing lesbians back into history" -- but the novel builds on universal romantic obstacles like jealousy, self-esteem and guilt rather than issues particular to sexual orientation.

The author Martina Cole paid £1,000 pounds in a charity auction to be a character in the book. Her money bought her E.M. Cole, a female ambulance driver protective of her cigarettes who has disreputable friends selling black market coffee, soap and lingerie.

The Night Watch is an excellent novel with some violence and biblically unsanctioned sexual content that might turn off James Dobson but not Ted Haggard. I haven't read a book with literary aims this ambitious in years, and clearly I'm missing out.

Well I was a little disappointed in this book. After all I had heard about it plus the Booker nomination, I was hoping for a classic. Clever way of writing (telling story in reverse time) but when I had finished I felt the book was not up to the other Booker nominated books. Some of the story lines and characters I thought were weak. If it had been a different war she was writing about I would have had more sympathy for some of the characters in the book who refuse to serve in the military. Like the American Civil War I feel the issues of WWII were worth fighting for. Especially (as most of the characters do) if you live in London and are being bombed by a foreign imperialistic military machine and your whole way of life is uprooted. We all know war is horrible and if it can be avoided it should be, but not at any cost. Some things have to be confronted and stopped. I also thought the book could have used a little more editing and the end (beginning) was disappointing to me. I did like the character Kay though. I just wish the book was as good as she was.

It's London during the horrors of the bombing raids of 1941 and the lives of a group of women intertwine inextricably.Four lesbian lovers agonise over exactly WHO they love and why, while another silly, stupid young woman continues her affair with a married soldier who gets her pregnant and then deserts her in her time of greatest need, following a botched abortion. Unbelievably, this lame brain girl continues with the affair for years afterwards, wasting her time on this idiot. As is probably apparent, this book made me angry but it's my own fault for reading a Sarah Waters book as she always writes about lesbian themes and if I hadn't been aware of just how much detail of love making she goes into, I certainly do now. Her descriptions of war torn London and of its inhabitants who were reduced to either zombie like fatalism or to quivering, nervous wrecks, are superbly done, but it's all so unhappy that it left me feeling totally depressed.

"Kay Langrish" of "The Night Watch" is too much like "Stephen Gordon" of Radclyffe Hall's 1927 novel, "The Well of Loneliness." Both women are butch, brave, ambulance drivers, rich, conservative, etc. Coincidence? I don't think so. That's just one example of the lack of originality in "The Night Watch." If your knowledge of lesbian literature begins with "Rubyfruit Jungle," Sarah Waters' reliance on earlier sapphic novels won't trouble you--you won't notice. But if, like me, you've read (say) Mary Renault's pre-Alexander books, you'll wonder where the footnotes went.

Tedious descriptions of nondescript lives. A plot is almost nonexistent, and what's there is hackneyed. The characters are dull. Long winded descriptions of the most mundane activities - making tea, the endless smoking of cigarettes, the walking down of streets. It's as if the novelist collected a lot of photographs taken during the 2nd World War in London and decided to write down in great detail what she saw in them. But anyone who has ever seen any of the dozens of movies about that war already knows exactly what it was like, what it looked like, what it felt like. The movie Mrs. Miniver starring Greer Garson comes to mind - what did the Miniver house look like after it was hit by a bomb, what did the church look like after it's roof was blown off in an air raid. I found after reading the fist 200 pages that I could easily follow what was going on by reading only the first sentence of every paragraph or speech, and then, by reading only one or two sentences off each page. Then by reading one line every few pages. The book just seemed pointless to me.

While the structure of the book is clever, most of the characters are uninteresting and the moral dilemmas are largely blah. The biggest mystery of all, that of the male protagonist, is not revealed until the very end and, frankly, was not worth waiting for. In addition, scenes are repeated ad nauseam. Take smoking, for example... there seems to be a cigarette scene in every page. And as far as homoerotic love goes, I've read much better tales.

I hate to say this because I liked her other books: Leave this one on the shelf unless there's nothing else to read.

This novel is interesting in concept -- going backwards through time to delve into how a set of characters ended up where they are at. And the backdrop of war time Britain is marvelously dark and wrought with peril. At the same time, I was disappointed by the lack of true depth to the characters. Unlike other novels by this author, it is more difficult in this novel to dive into the characters' heads. Perhaps Viv is the most fleshed out of the lot, and even then, it takes a bit of work. Duncan, Helen, Kay all fall a bit flat. I kept hoping to capture more of their spirit. A much better novel by this author would be "Affinity" which plumbs the depths of the characters' psyches and delivers a delicious twist in the end. Perhaps that is why I was a bit disappointed with "The Night Watch" -- while it is a decent enough creation, it doesn't linger on the mind the way I've come to expect from such a talented author.

For her fourth effort, Sarah Waters leaves her trademark Victorian setting for a slightly more recent one: London during the second world war. Her other trademark, lesbian romance, is still present, and thank heavens for that, because it's what Waters writes best.

The Night Watch has an interesting reverse structure, starting in 1947 and ending in 1941. It makes you delve into the characters' past, instead of looking to their futures. It works, and yet it doesn't. It's an ideal way for Waters to slowly reveal her characters' secrets, but when the book is finished, it leaves the reader wanting. The stories seem unresolved, somehow. I found myself wanting a last glimpse into 1947, to see how the characters ended up. Sure, one can turn to the first part of the book again, but too much is left out there, in order to create suspense for the later parts.

Still, this is a very entertaining and moving book, and a recommendation for any fan of Waters.

I have read the book and listened to the Recorded Books 17 cd version. I found each to be throughly enjoying. The recorded version highlights the beauty of the prose in a remarkable way and I think revealed nuances I overlooked in the printed version.

This is a very well crafted piece of literature. I found the reverse order heightened my appreciation for what the characters were going through. This is a novel of betrayals and I found I cared as much for the betrayers as for the betrayed. Waters has revealed once again how often our lives are spent looking to get out of those relationships we worked so hard to get into in the first place.

I can't think of a recent work of fiction I have enjoyed so much.

Sarah Waters' latest novel is not quite up to snuff compared to her previous works. Not wavering from her style, this novel is an unusual construction. She works backwards by beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. The construction is interesting and the writing is good, but it just does not seem to have a plot. And she never makes us care for her characters. I am holding out hope for her next.

A Damn good read. It didn't look interesting, but it was. I did like the backwards timeline in the book. It is a good technique for dragging people into what happened to get our characters to where they are at the beginning of the book. Fabulous descriptions of life in London during the war (WW2) and I did like the cast. The women are all strong and survive the best way they can.

Fingersmith is my favorite book and Affinity is wonderful. I even liked (not loved) Tipping the Velvet. So I have been anxiously waiting for Waters to come out with a new book.

If it wasn't Sarah Waters I would have given it up at page 100. It was extremely slow with almost nothing happening in the first 150 pages. After that you get into the book, wanting to keep going and expecting something big to happen...it never comes. I just finished the book last night and went back to the beginning to see if there was any real resolution to any of the stories because it ends at the beginning. Even in the beginning you do not get an ending. No ENDING NO RESOLUTION. Overall i was incredibly disappointed in HOW MUCH description she gave to every scene. When you knew something was going to happen and were anticipating it, it sometimes took a good 40 pages and then its like a sentence worth of detail you'd been waiting for. Overall I would not recommend this book for first time Waters readers.

I absolutely love Sarah Waters novels. I just found this one to be sooo depressing. There is no doubt that she is a wonderful novelist, but I have to agree, that I really did not like the characters. Maybe Duncan, but otherwise,I did not feel much compassion for the other characters. It is hard for me to like a book very much if I do not find redeeming qualities in the characters in a novel. The War Time historical part of the novel was very well done. The idea of meeting civilians in wartime London was also quite fascinating. But I have to give the overall review at only 3 stars. At one point during the book, I was ready for the whole lot of them to just jump off the London bridge.

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 first thing that struck me is her language - in previous novels she stunned me with her words. this is much more bland. maybe its because of the time period 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, try her first three so you can see her at her best.

I can't believe that other reviewers here gave this book less than five stars. If I could give it more stars, I would. It's more touching than any anti-war novel I've read; it's right up there with "Cry, The Beloved Country," and other books that plumb the depths of sorrow while retaining a dignity that lifts them out of being simply grim. The essence of the writing is precious and heartfelt. There is a light around this book, and I feel it should be considered for the Nobel.

The iconoclastic lesbian fiction of Sarah Waters has unexpectedly been catapulted to new heights of brilliance within her latest trailblazing work. Having at last transcended her obsession with fictionalizing the subterranean and rather bohemian elements of Victorian society by focusing on post WWII England, Waters has simultaneously expanded her genre. Fingersmith was a masterpiece of infernal pacing and labyrinthine plot conceptualizations, thus her fans are sure to be flabbergasted by her sudden transmogrification of style and substance in Night Watch. Echoing British modernist novelists, Waters achieves heart - rendering crystallizations of her character's stream - of - consciousness epiphanies colored by the post - traumatic stress and sinister complications of war. Her depth of knowledge of the political landscapes of the time period florishes metaphorically in the complex battles of the human heart. Ultimately, Sarah Waters reveals that it is the history of the individual that is so much more compelling than the mere individual within history. I encourage all Waters fans to champion her expansion of territory and literary style instead of expecting the familiar, for with Sarah a landscape of infinite possibility and suprise awaits! Nevertheless, she has reached the apex of her genius thus far in Night Watch. Come find me if you agree. We should have tea.

Interesting characters, very well evoked history, made me feel like it must have been like in the Blitz. Found the end a bit unsatisfactory, as though she didn't quite know how to end it, otherwise I'd have said 5 stars.

The Night Watch is a well written, thought provoking novel set in London during the aftermath of WWII. It's a sober read and had me thinking of the people living in the Middle East today. Trying to live your life in a war zone is difficult enough, but made even more difficult by internal turmoil in trying to live a life outside the norm. This is not a Barbara Pym novel, but excellent in its own way.

Ms. Waters is a great writer. Her previous novels, marvelous. However, had I'd been the editor of her most recent effort, I would attempt to convince her to eliminate the characters of Viv, Reggie, and Duncan from the book. They add little of value and detract, rather than add, to the story. The work needed to be shorter and more tightly written, in my opinion.

Moving backwards in time, the story covers the lives of four Londoners during WWII (2 women and 1 man, all gay except for one straight woman). The lives connect and intersect in surprising and revealing ways. Tender and extraordinarily intimate with the backdrop of brutal war.

Ms Waters' Fingersmith is one of my top five favorite novels. Tipping the Velvet would fall into the top 20. The Night Watch, IMHO, flirted around a story that screamed for plot and snappy dialogue. What we get instead is a moody character piece, similar in tone to Affinity. Ms Waters is such an INTERESTING writer. Whether or not she returns to plot driven stories is unknowable. I'll continue to purchase her books because the woman, even on an off day, writes better than 99% of her contemporaries.

Having devoured all three of SW's earlier works of brilliant, engrossing historical fiction, I splurged and got The Night Watch in hardcover. And horror of horrors, dear reader, I must confess that I haven't been able to bring myself to finish it! The characters are woefully unsympathetic; the reverse-chronology method of storytelling limps along and feels like a gimmick (and a hard to follow one at that); and SW's famed method of suspense-building is MIA. Perhaps one of you who made it through the entire thing can write and exhort me to finish it (hint: if you tell me you were bored through page 150, too, but it got better, I might believe you), but as of now I wanted to register my sad regrets on this one.

An interestingly structured account of several characters in 1940's London.

Waters starts with the present and works backward, illuminating the present situation, which appears innocuous and even shallow 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 relationship between 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 somewhat made up for by the ugly depths that we learn lie behind our initial picture. Dramatic individual scenes keep the immediate interest level fairly high.

Having loved all three of Waters' previous novels, though, I was disappointed by this. It was impossible to sympathize with most of the characters, not because they were weak or venal (they were) but because they were boring. Their concerns seemed mundane and their personalities unremarkable. In addition, strangely precious dialogue had a jarring effect and made it hard to take the narrative seriously at times.

Queer Girl Genre - Literary fiction

Queer Girl Quotient - almost all lesbian main characters

How sexy? - some hot g/g moments

This book is beautiful and sad and wonderful. It follows a group of lesbians in London during WWII. The bombs fall; the characters live intensely.

Kay is the dashing, brave ambulance driver. Julia is the educated upper-class writer lesbian. Helen is the working class femme who secretly cuts herself with razors.

Waters structures the novel out of sequence, which makes the story start out slowly, but lets her build to an ending that is stunning, heartbreaking.

I loved this book. You've got to read it.

Make sure you also read Tipping the Velvet. It's Waters' most engaging book, and a ripping yarn. It was made into a BBC movie that I'm dying to see.

To start with, before people start throwing things at me, let me say that I realize that the set of main characters here includes some males and a heterosexual woman. However the stories of these characters are, at least for me, quite banal, and the book would have been better off without them. The main story here, for me at least, concerns the three lesbians Helen, Julia, and Kay.

I have not read any of Sarah Waters other books, but I get the feeling that this was her first book, and that she was originally unable to publish it. Then, after the success of her other books, I believe, she resubmitted this book (perhaps because of a contractual obligation) and the publisher accepted it. It's a weak book. As several other reviewers have mentioned, there is no real plot, and because of this even the three main characters never reach their potential.

The book is divided into three main sections, in reverse chronological order. The first section, set in 1947, is about 175 pages long, and is almost a sort of prelude. Ideally, it ought to intrigue the reader, making the reader want to get to the two subsequent, chronologically earlier sections to find out how these characters got into their 1947 situation. Unfortunately, though, this 1947 situation is not very interesting, so the reader is not all that intrigued.

And this is the problem with the whole backwards structure of the book. The reader gradually learns the original story behind all those things in the first two (but later in time) sections of the book which the author intended to be so mysterious. But they these later events are only mildly puzzling, not intriguing, so by the time one gets to the explanations, the reader has almost forgotten them. Or at least that was true for me.

The last section of the book, set in 1941, is only about fifty pages long, and certainly has the most intense story.

One can see why the author couldn't tell the story in chronological order, because that would have put all the most interesting interactions at the beginning of the book and then the remainder of the novel would have been a long anti-climax. The novel would have been a story of some characters who have some very intense experiences during the the London blitz, and then gradually grow older and have lives that become fairly ordinary. The usual way to handle a problem like this would be to start with the recent part of the story and then tell the older material in a series of flashbacks. Presumably the author originally tried this but couldn't make it work.

The thing is that this is not a book whose main interest comes from the story line. But there are some very vivid scenes in the wartime sections, especially the long scene where Helen and Julia go out for a very dangerous walk in London during the blackout with the bombs falling. (A scene that's even more interesting because Helen is cheating on Kay. If the reader remembers from the first section of the book, one will be aware that Helen will eventually break up with Kay and become in a committed relationship with Julia.) These scenes, and some of the interactions between the characters, are what make the book worth reading. But it's hard to keep reading when there's no strong strong plot that makes the reader keep thinking, "I've got to find out what happens next."

Really well written, and obviously well researched. Also the development of the characters is terrific. That stated, I found most of the characters to be navel-gazing, pitiful creatures ... obsessed with their pursuit of happiness in wartime. There is no "higher purpose" for anyone. Duncan's father is shown as a hard-of-hearing buffoon, but given his life experiences and his actions to keep things together he's the most commendable character. Since he wasn't gay, however, I guess not worthy of more development. I'm reminded of that John Mellencamp song ... "when you live for yourself it's hard on eveyone else".

I absolutely loved this book. This was the first Sarah Waters book I have read and I thought the writing was extraordinary and beautiful. I found the characters wonderful, the setting of wartime London fascinating and could not put the book down. Ms. Waters is a fantastic writer - I have since read 'Fingersmith', which I also loved and will read her other books.

My first Sarah Waters book, I really liked the book's structure, intertwining stories that don't completely come together until the end, and the 'being there' in daily life during the war. Only objection -- was it really necessary to have smoking play such a prominent role? Perhaps it is historically accurate, but there are lots of other things about the people that I would have appreciated learning instead of lots of words dedicated to their smoking.

For Sarah Waters fans, this is worth purchasing from the storeUK, where it is already available. With the discount and exchange rate, the cost was about $25. Don't wait until the end of March if you're a fan. It's well worth watching as a master writer of the Victorian Era applies her skill to more recent historical fiction.