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I really like Sarah Waters. Her other novels all feature Victorian lesbians. Affinity is a very spooky, claustrophobic thriller/love story/spoiler about a medium imprisoned after a seance goes horribly wrong, and the woman who visits her in prison. Tipping the Velvet is a very fun picaresque which bounces from oyster bars to theatres to the rooms of kept girls. Fingersmith is a wild thriller which doesn't entirely make sense in places, but is one hell of a ride. I recommend all of those. Some people hate Affinity because of the DO NOT SPOIL ending, but it's my favorite.
The Night Watch is well-written and gripping, but lacks the excitement, passion, and sense of joyous discovery that permeate Waters' other books. (Even her tragedies seem like she had fun writing them, even if the characters didn't have fun living them.) It's about the intertwined lives of several Londoners after and during the Blitz, and is told backwards in time. This narrative device is not arbitrary, and provides for a few interesting discoveries and poignant moments; but it also makes the entire book quite depressing, as we already know how everyone will end up, and nobody ends up better than "maybe, just maybe, they will now take a tiny step toward improving their life," and some of them don't even get that.
Several years after the war is over, everyone is miserable. Kay, the butch former ambulance driver, is mired in post-traumatic stress, depression, and agoraphoia; Duncan, the young former prisoner, is living with an old man and collecting worthless antiques; his sister Vi, a young woman, is stuck in a loveless and passionless affair with a married man; and Helen, whom I regret to say that I HATE, is obsessively jealous of her lover, the cold writer Julia whom I also kind of hate.
After a long section exploring their lives, the narrative jumps back to the Blitz, and we see who they were before, what their relationships were, and some light is shed on the more myserious elements of the first section. At the end of this, the concluding section jumps back even further, to the start of the Blitz; the concluding scene is lovely, but intensely depressing because we know how that particular relationship worked out.
I was fascinated by Kay, the heroic ambulance driver, her work rescuing victims of the air raids, and the society of butch volunteers she hung out with. I could have happily read an entire book about her and her friend Mickey, whom I loved with a passion disproportionate to her brief appearances. The other characters either interested me less, or their situations interested me less; the reason Duncan was in jail was tragic and not a story often told, but he was a rather opaque character and so were the men he interacted with; I liked his sister Vi, but except for her brief but wonderful interaction with Kay, her story was mostly about loving a married jerk and that has been told a million times; Helen and Julia I just didn't like, ever, and the more I learned about them, the less time I wanted to spend in their company, even on paper.
Worth reading if you're a Waters fan, but not a good introduction. It did make me want to read more about the Blitz, though. (Two of my favorite short stories of all time are set there, Connie Willis' "Fire Watch" ("deaths: one cat") and "Jack.") Any recommendations? Especially, any recommendations for fact or fiction featuring lesbians and/or people doing the more dramatic sort of volunteer work, search and rescue, fire watch, ambulance drivers, and the like?
The Night Watch is well-written and gripping, but lacks the excitement, passion, and sense of joyous discovery that permeate Waters' other books. (Even her tragedies seem like she had fun writing them, even if the characters didn't have fun living them.) It's about the intertwined lives of several Londoners after and during the Blitz, and is told backwards in time. This narrative device is not arbitrary, and provides for a few interesting discoveries and poignant moments; but it also makes the entire book quite depressing, as we already know how everyone will end up, and nobody ends up better than "maybe, just maybe, they will now take a tiny step toward improving their life," and some of them don't even get that.
Several years after the war is over, everyone is miserable. Kay, the butch former ambulance driver, is mired in post-traumatic stress, depression, and agoraphoia; Duncan, the young former prisoner, is living with an old man and collecting worthless antiques; his sister Vi, a young woman, is stuck in a loveless and passionless affair with a married man; and Helen, whom I regret to say that I HATE, is obsessively jealous of her lover, the cold writer Julia whom I also kind of hate.
After a long section exploring their lives, the narrative jumps back to the Blitz, and we see who they were before, what their relationships were, and some light is shed on the more myserious elements of the first section. At the end of this, the concluding section jumps back even further, to the start of the Blitz; the concluding scene is lovely, but intensely depressing because we know how that particular relationship worked out.
I was fascinated by Kay, the heroic ambulance driver, her work rescuing victims of the air raids, and the society of butch volunteers she hung out with. I could have happily read an entire book about her and her friend Mickey, whom I loved with a passion disproportionate to her brief appearances. The other characters either interested me less, or their situations interested me less; the reason Duncan was in jail was tragic and not a story often told, but he was a rather opaque character and so were the men he interacted with; I liked his sister Vi, but except for her brief but wonderful interaction with Kay, her story was mostly about loving a married jerk and that has been told a million times; Helen and Julia I just didn't like, ever, and the more I learned about them, the less time I wanted to spend in their company, even on paper.
Worth reading if you're a Waters fan, but not a good introduction. It did make me want to read more about the Blitz, though. (Two of my favorite short stories of all time are set there, Connie Willis' "Fire Watch" ("deaths: one cat") and "Jack.") Any recommendations? Especially, any recommendations for fact or fiction featuring lesbians and/or people doing the more dramatic sort of volunteer work, search and rescue, fire watch, ambulance drivers, and the like?
