The Night Watch
Nov. 28th, 2021 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearAs with other Sarah Waters books I've read, The Night Watch is brilliantly constructed and full of layered, flawed, very real characters.
It follows various people, who are variously connected together, through their lives during the Second World War. It's about wanting somewhere to belong, and wanting to be seen and understood, and being blind to certain aspects of a situation because of a desire to be loved.
It's very affecting, very involving and very grounded in reality - but it's also very grim and very depressing in places.
It also has an interesting structure - it starts out showing us where all the characters are in 1947, then goes back to see them all again in 1944, and ends with a section set in 1941. This is very clever, in that details that are revealed in the later/earlier sections gain more significance because we already know what happens afterwards. But I also wanted to know more about what happened to them all after 1947, so moving backwards in time was slightly frustrating as well as intriguing.
Overall, a very well-written book, but perhaps just a bit too real and unpleasant for me.
It follows various people, who are variously connected together, through their lives during the Second World War. It's about wanting somewhere to belong, and wanting to be seen and understood, and being blind to certain aspects of a situation because of a desire to be loved.
It's very affecting, very involving and very grounded in reality - but it's also very grim and very depressing in places.
It also has an interesting structure - it starts out showing us where all the characters are in 1947, then goes back to see them all again in 1944, and ends with a section set in 1941. This is very clever, in that details that are revealed in the later/earlier sections gain more significance because we already know what happens afterwards. But I also wanted to know more about what happened to them all after 1947, so moving backwards in time was slightly frustrating as well as intriguing.
Overall, a very well-written book, but perhaps just a bit too real and unpleasant for me.
