Sex Geek

I always know I’m on a roll with my reading when I’ve got so many books on the go that I forget to review them. Case in point: I read Sarah Waters’ latest, The Night Watch, for the Queer Ladies’ Reading Society meeting of two months ago, and it’s still sitting on my desk waiting for me to write about it. So here we go.

My general feeling about Sarah Waters is that she’s got a damned fine pen, and a really rich and unique way of writing about what kind of adventures a lesbian might have gotten up to in the distant past - her first three novels were set in the late 1800s - in ways that feel realistic rather than idealistic, and yet no less delicious for it.

That being said, nothing so far has quite topped Tipping the Velvet - her famous début, a complex lesbian love story set in the world of 1880s cabaret variety shows, and later made into a very successful three-part TV movie. It’s full of glamour… the stage, the debauchery, the villainy, the heroism, the cross-dressing, the despair, the quaint references to cunnilingus. It is a masterpiece.

Her second, Affinity, set in the 1860s, dealt with spiritualism and other sorts of trickery, and pulled off a plot twist worthy of M. Night "I see dead people" Shyamalan, but it didn’t quite grab me by the innards the way the first one did despite its lesbianful plot and equally skilled writing.

Her third, Fingersmith, is set in part in a madhouse with the attendant lesbian tropes of the female warden and the wrongly imprisoned young girl, among others. This one climbed a few notches higher than Affinity (in my humble opinion) but didn’t make my readerly heart soar to the heights of Tipping.

The Night Watch, now… well, it’s very different from the first three in a number of ways. First, Sarah has parted (with such sweet sorrow?) from her lengthy love affair with the Victorian era and leapt forward into the 1940s, setting the book during wartime  London. Rather than imagining what lesbian lives might have looked like, this one gives some fairly realistic descriptions (thanks to her extensive research) of what they probably really were like - among other things, one of the main characters is an ambulance driver, the kind of position that our queer sisters of yesteryear very much did gravitate towards (even in WWI, for that matter - witness Stephen’s crowd of army gals in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness). So the whole story has lost the mystical, romantic flavour of her first three while gaining a certain not-quite-familiarity, or perhaps resonant believability that, despite its certain status as fiction, feels less like fantasy and more like history. Yum.

That’s not the only difference. Instead of focusing 90% of the narrative on lesbians, she gives a little more plot space to others as well, entering into the trials of a few straight folks and even touching on male same-sex desire (in prison, no less). This gives the story a greater range than her past work, in some ways, setting up lesbian lives within their necessary and fully fleshed-out co-existence with non-lesbians rather than letting all of them fade into the background. It’s also intriguing to see her tackle a few sex scenes that don’t take place between girls - not because they’re particularly titillating, but because she doesn’t come at it with distaste or discomfort, just realism. Good job!

She’s also tried out a new narrative structure - the book starts in 1947 and moves back to 1944 to then conclude in 1941. It’s an odd tack to take, and all the more so for its failure to produce a staggering plot twist. There is no satisfyingly ta-daaa finish here, as I figured that out about halfway through. Certainly, various mysteries of the characters’ interconnectedness are elucidated as the book moves forward (backward?) but there’s no moment of Truth, simply a number of small revelations.

That being said - at that fateful halfway mark when I realized I might well have figured out the bulk of the plot mysteries already - I started to simply enjoy the story for what it is. Rather than looking for a Big Magical Moment, I just absorbed the flavour of the times, and let myself settle into the melancholy, the confusion, and the aching joy of love between women - between people in general, really - in, and after, a time of war. Read with this mindset, the book became enormously compelling, an opportunity to soak in the flavour of history through a tale that’s pleasantly queered, unlike most stories of the time.

I definitely give this latest oeuvre a thumbs-up. It still hasn’t earned itself a place higher than Tipping in my personal rankings, but it’s a notch higher than the last two. Really, it’s a luscious read.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.