Review of 'The Night Watch' by Sarah Waters

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters

2*

"Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past - whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in sometimes surprising ways. In wartime London, the women work - as ambulance drivers, ministry clerks, and building inspectors. There are feats of heroism, epic and quotidian, and tragedies both enormous and personal." Sarah Waters describes the taut composure of a rescue worker in the aftermath of a bombing, the idle longing of a young woman for her soldier lover, the peculiar thrill of a convict watching the sky ignite through the bars on his window, the hunger of a woman prowling the streets for an encounter, and the panic of another who sees her love affair coming to an end."

-synopsis from Goodreads

I had really high hopes for this book, but I was terribly disappointed. I had read Affinity, another book by Sarah Waters, a few years ago and I loved it, so I expected this book to be pretty good as well. There are several reasons why I didn't enjoy this book. First of all, the story was incredibly slow and extremely anticlimactic. Secondly, the characters started to blend together after a while and I had a difficult time keeping them straight. The author definitely needed to develop her characters a little better and give the reader a reason to care about what happened to them. Third, there wasn't even a real plot to the story. It was just the story of four people during WWII in London and how their lives were interconnected.

One thing I did find interesting about this book is that the story was told backwards, so I have to give Waters credit for writing the story in such an original way. It begins in 1947 and goes backward to 1941, which was an interesting way to explain why the characters were the way they were, but the story was just too slow and uninteresting for it to really work.