About this title: Set during the air raids, blacked-out streets, and sexual adventure of World War II London, "The Night Watch" is "the finest achievement yet" ("Guardian") from the bestselling author of "Fingersmith" and "Tipping the Velvet."
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781594482304ISBN:1594482306
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Clean pages, no marks or tears. Minor shelf wear. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 528 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781594482304ISBN:1594482306
Description: Very Good. Covers have wear, including rubbing and creasing at spine, as well as around edges and at corners; light reading wear; otherwise book is in great shape. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"I really enjoyed this book, despite myself. Its premise is pretty grim: Britain during and just after the second world war. It follows a group of 4 young londoners, some who are closely connected and some tangentially so. It's a story told backward, which kept me very interested, until the end when everything had been told. I started reading this book thinking I would put it down because the subject matter was so sad, but the writing pulled me in. She had a great way of painting characters, especially the women, and her descriptions of lesbian life during that period was fascinating. Also she did a great job of placing you in the moment: hospital drivers rescuing blitz victims, conscientious objectors in prison, office workers in the drab years after the way. It's always so interesting to me to read about the great wars in europe, since as americans we haven't experienced anything on that scale on our soil since the 1860s."
"Enjoyable but strange. Every single relationship in this book (with the possible exception of one -- it's been a while since I've read this) is a homosexual one. And I found this an interesting experiments, because instead of drawing attention to difference by including one among many (the way so many TV shows will include one gay character or one minority character), Waters simply creates a world in which homosexual relationships are the norm. She does this not by creating an alternative universe, but simply by highlighting the existing homosexual relationships and writing only about those. It's an interesting approach. The plotline of the novel -- different women who watch for bombs to drop on WWII London -- is well done, but it was the political aspect that captivated my attention for longer. What is more radical: representing 1 or 2 homosexual relationships alongside an equal number of heterosexual relationships, so as to demonstrate that the world is peopled equally with same-sex and separate-sex relationships? Or presenting a world where homosexuality is the norm, where any heterosexual reader wonders if he/she feels as a homosexual reader might feel reading a more typical novel? I don't know, but I applaud Waters' experimentation here with different models of representing sexuality. This question, far more than anything else in the novel, made me think."
"With The Night Watch, I have now read and loved everything Sarah Waters has published (keep it coming!), so I started this novel with the expectation of enjoying it. It didn't let me down. I ended up loving the backwards storytelling, though I was kind of bummed at the end of the fist section--wait, we don't get to find out what happens after that? But, as with most of Waters' characters, what happened before is easily as interesting as what happens next. She does a phenomenal job planting hints--just not quite enough information--and building on them, and building on them
My only complaint is that the last section felt like she was quickly wrapping up loose ends, no fooling around, but it might just be that I didn't want the novel to end. I'm not up to speed on my Blitz history, so I would basically believe anything Waters told me about the time period; nevertheless, all of the details felt authentic. I feel like I know what 1947 smelled like, now. Halfway through the second section, I stopped reading and went to make dinner and seriously felt like I had been running around through ash and grit for the past two hours. But in a good way. Vivid, powerful, highly detailed and painstakingly crafted."
"In many ways, this book was a departure from Waters' three earlier novels - she moves away from the late Victorian period into the 40s, she becomes more daring in the arrangement of her narrative structure, and she presents "queer" as encompassing lifestyles across a broader spectrum. Given the extent of the experimentation that Waters is clearly making in this book, it is perhaps not suprising that some elements succeed more than others.
Firstly, my favourite thing about this book was Waters' expansion of focus. In her earlier novels the focus remained on a single lesbian couple (more or less narrowly) and their attempts to be together in a society that denies them the modes with which to express their love. In The Night Watch, there are four key protagonists whose histories we follow, and the question of who or what is "queer" is much less determined. After all, is Kay, a lesbian who dresses like a man, was an ambulance driver in the war, and who wants, more than anything else to be a "husband" to her lover, more or less queer than Vivien, a feminine straight typist, who is embroiled in a relationship with a married man (and pays terrible costs to remain with him). The strange connections between the four protagonists and the terrible secrets that they must try and hide from society at large are set against a wartime and post-war London in which the landscape is shifting, changing and where strange things seem hardly to matter any more - very Bowen-esque. It is when she is describing the peculiarity of the war, the dislocations it creates, that Waters' prose is strongest for me. Take for example these passages:
There was something elemental, it was true, to the heavily laden figures, as they made their uncertain way into the dimly lighted mouth of the Underground. They might have been mendicants or pedlars; refugees from some other, medieval war- or else, from some war of the future, as imagined by H.G. Wells or a fanciful writer like that... Then Helen caught snatches of their conversation: 'Head over heels! How we laughed!'; 'A pound of onions and a saddle of pork'; 'He said, "It's got fancy teeth." I said, "It ought to have better teeth than I've got, at that price...'"
There was a sense- for it could not be seen so much as felt- of exposed ground, unnatural space. The pavements were edged with fences and hoardings, but Helen fouhnd her thoughts slipping past the flimsy panels of wood to the rubble, the burnt and borken things, the uncovered girders and yawning basements and smashed brick, beyond
Despite the ability to evoke the strangeness and subsequent mundanity of post-war life in her ever strong prose style, not everything about this book worked for me. The reverse chronological order of the book made little sense to me - what exactly was the point of it? It didn't really, in the end, serve any purpose, other than making the book seem "different". I kept waiting for it to become clear why this approach had been taken but I am still baffled as to why this tale wasn't told using more traditional structure. Its not even that the stories and histories of these characters was hard to follow: more that just things seemed to lack impact, because as a reader you already knew where everything was going. Nor, for the most part, were the secrets revealed as we went further back sufficiently compelling to warrant the structuring of the novel.
Another problem I faced with this book was that in parts it felt "baggy" - notably the way way way overlong 1947 section. I really struggled to stay interested throughout this section, to care about the characters. In contrast the 1941 section is miniscule: once we have finally got some kind of "handle" on the characters, begun to care about how everything started, their stories are cut off - some key dramatic moments, which we have been waiting the whole book to get to (for example, to find out exactly what happened between Duncan and Alec) are given far too little space, and so in the end I was left curiously disappointed.
In conclusion then, although this book has many interesting threads and ideas, it ultimately fails to tie them up in a way that makes the book work. And whilst it is interesting to witness the growth and experimentation of an author as talented as Waters, it doesn't neccessarily lead to the most satisfying of reading experiences."
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