The Night Watch by Sarah Waters Virago, $246 Lesbian historian Lillian Faderman records how US General Dwight D. Eisenhower asked a sergeant named Johnnie Phelps to ferret out the lesbians in her battalion. When Phelps replied that she would be at the top of the list, and that he would have to replace 'all the file clerks, the section heads, most of the commanders, and the motor pool', Eisenhower told her to forget the order. As Faderman has observed of the wartime lesbian experience (albeit an American one), nothing changed in the women themselves, but the exigencies of war saw them 'meta-morphosed socially from a monster to a hero to a sicko'. The second world war would seem to be a rich setting for a novel by Welsh-born writer Sarah Waters, who is partial to a 'lesbo Victorian romp', as she dubbed her 1998 debut novel Tipping the Velvet when it was turned into a three-part drama by the BBC in 2002. The Night Watch is not a lesbo romp. It's about private secrets and the fear of losing the approval of others should they be known. The novel opens in the dreary 1947 of bombed-out, half-starved London, moving back in time through the lives of three women and a man - Kay, Helen, Viv and Duncan - towards the secrets each seeks to hide. Kay is a masculine lesbian and ambulance driver. She was in her element during the war, able to wear men's clothes and do a man's job, even outdoing them when it came to disentangling bombed bodies from railings. With the end of war, Kay is again subjected to the careless abuse of strangers, who feel moved to ask, 'Don't you know the war's over?' Her friend Mickey, who works at a garage, is given a threepenny bit and told to buy some lipstick. Kay's life since the war has been reduced to watching films, often arriving half-way through a session and staying to watch the beginning of the next, which is how Waters chooses to arrange this story. Duncan works in a candle factory and lives with Mr Mundy, whom he passes off as his uncle. In the opening pages, the pair travel across London to see Mr Leonard, a faith healer, whose upstairs tenant is Kay. Waters, who explored Victorian spiritualism in Affinity (1999), gives a strong presence to the unseen Mr Leonard. Duncan's sister Viv works in a dating agency with Helen, and their lunchtime chats and cigarettes out on the fire-escape landing alert the reader to something in their pasts. Viv doesn't want to talk about Duncan's past, nor does Helen want to go into details of her relationship with Julia, an increasingly successful detective story writer with whom she lives. Both Helen and Viv draw back from telling their secrets, although both feel the pain of keeping things private. Having tantalised, Waters moves The Night Watch back to 1944, with its blackouts and the blitz. 'The dust was still swirling, making everyone cough. There was that queer, disorientating atmosphere that Kay had always noticed at sites like this. The air felt charged, as if with a rapidly beating pulse, as if still ringing, physically vibrating as if the atoms that made up the house, the garden, the people themselves, had been jolted out of their moorings and were still in the process of settling back.' The Night Watch is a big departure from Waters' previous work. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Booker-shortlisted Fingersmith (2002) were set in Victorian England and were mysteries in the style of 19th-century sensationalist Wilkie Collins - full of lunatic asylums, con-artists and melodramatics. Having shifted her focus by a half-century, Waters also changes her technique - the previous novels were driven by a single narrative; here, each character has a secret that comes from their past. Confident as she was when moving about in the late 19th century, Waters seems to have trouble with mid-20th-century dialogue, which at times seems contrived, but she won't lose any fans over it and new readers will enjoy The Night Watch as good storytelling in its own right.
