In dark days of war, ordinary lives connect

The Night Watch The Night Watch

A Novel

Sarah Waters

Riverhead Books: 452 pp., $25.95

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REVIEWING a book requires a pen poised to mark revealing images and details of character, to scribble admiring or disparaging comments in the margins. My copy of Sarah Waters’ fourth novel is largely free of ink, not because there was nothing to mark, but because I was unwilling to stop reading long enough to write.

Waters has the gift of story, the ability to dissolve the distance between reader and subject until nothing but experience remains.

Her earlier books, most notably “Fingersmith,” were set in a startlingly sensual Victorian England and included enough sinuous plotting and erotic charge to keep all but the most hardened reader up late. “The Night Watch” marks a departure: less thrilling and more meditative, to be savored rather than galloped through.

Skipping forward to an England reeling from the blows of World War II, Waters has braided together a set of relatively ordinary people whose entwined lives capture the fragility and ferocity of a world that is falling down around them. Or more accurately, she has unbraided them, because in three sections, headed “1947,” “1944” and “1941,” Waters tells her story in reverse.

In 1947, Kay, Helen, Viv, Julia and Duncan range in age from 37 to 24. They have, at various points, served time in jail, written popular mysteries, driven an ambulance during the blitz, carried on an affair with a married soldier and struggled with a monstrous jealousy. Three of them form a romantic triangle. Two of them are siblings (not to give too much away, which is not easy when a book begins at the end). Each has felt passion and the ache that marks its passing.

Oh, and three of them are lesbians, and one is gay. Waters is that rarity, a writer who embraces the gay/lesbian label but is not limited by it. What Julia at one point terms “the whole grisly ‘L’ business,” Waters handles with grace and candor. If gay themes are beginning to find a comfortable place in mainstream literature, it is because of writers such as Waters, whose feats of sympathetic imagination situate characters in a context that is neither gay nor straight, but human.

War has pushed sex to the margins. During the fighting, Waters’ characters move through London in a state of constant, mortal peril, and after it, on the “well-swept, devastated streets,” in a state of exhaustion. Happiness is a scarce commodity, as “if it’s on the ration,” and pleasures must be treasured -- you must “make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came.” Kay’s landlord, a Christian Science healer, instructs a stream of patients to deny the idea of pain and keeps a “night watch” after hours, “sending out his fierce benediction into the fragility” of the darkness.

Tenuous moments of connection are the only resistance against so much savagery.

Waters writes period detail like an eyewitness. Prison settings have figured in her earlier work; here she renders the unique terror of inmates during an air raid, left in their cells. Ambulance drivers, returned safe from another grisly run, examine each other’s eyelashes for shards of glass. Terraced houses left standing bear the traces of their bombed-out neighbors: “the zig-zag of phantom staircases and the dints of absent hearths.”

The backward narrative isn’t an unqualified success. It’s tricky to keep straight the characters’ intersections through time and space without a chart. It’s also difficult to let the last section be the concluding one -- too tempting to flip back to the beginning and put the ending at the end. But the process of unpicking the past is compelling, “people’s pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures,” as Kay notes.

Where Waters’ previous novels were feats of narrative momentum, “The Night Watch” moves more gently, allowing a gradual deepening of insight. Waters has left Victorian Gothic for a more modern mood, capturing the ennobling energies of wartime and of love and the stranded souls their ebb leaves behind. “You started off,” Helen muses, “imagining you’d be a kind of heroine. You ended up thinking only of yourself.” “The Night Watch” will satisfy -- and perhaps surprise -- her fans and attract new ones.

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Janice P. Nimura’s reviews have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post.