Change and decay

The prizewinning novelist Sarah Waters enjoys subverting our expectations, telling tales of the illicit, stripping away our veneers of polite respectability. In Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet she laid bare a Victorian world of lesbian love, titillating her readers with the scurrilous idea that women could have had a good time without those bewhiskered men of empire. For her latest book, she has moved centuries, swapping bodices and ankle boots for slacks and silk pyjamas.

The Night Watch is set in 1940s London — rubble-strewn, cheerless, unrecognisable without its bustling crowds, street signs, railings. But this is not a novel about plucky heroines and the cheery community spirit which is supposed to have erupted during the Blitz. In the chaos of war, suggests Waters, there are plenty of opportunities for alternative behaviour to flourish — men on the move, women in trousers, everyday routines overturned.

Not everyone behaves better under duress. Not everyone wanted to be part of the war effort. Bomb damage for some was a convenient way of disappearing without fear of discovery or recriminations. As Viv, deeply involved with a married man, suddenly realises: ‘She never thought of that before — about all the secrets that the war must have swallowed up, left buried in dust and darkness and silence.’

But the novel begins after the war is over, in 1947, when our characters are struggling to readjust to the social clampdown that peace has brought with it. Kay, cropped hair, tailored slacks, cufflinks and highly polished shoes, aimlessly wanders through the West End, no job, no settled address, deliberately alone. Why? What is she hiding from? Viv meanwhile has swapped her typing job in the ministry for a dating agency set up by Helen, supplying the bereaved, the betrayed, the newly divorced with new partners: ‘They came into the bureau still looking stunned,’ women whose husbands have forbidden them to carry on working, men shocked by the new-found confidence of their wives and girlfriends.