From a young age – ten perhaps – the author Dan Richards has had a strained relationship with night-time. Grappling with insomnia, he would take ‘the homeopathic approach to [his] waking nightmares’, rereading Moominland Midwinter despite its existential terrors. Even now, he writes, he finds it easier to sleep when he is not at home. This has, for better or worse, given him time to think – and lots to think about – while not much else was going on.
In the avowed spirit of Auden/Britten’s Night Mail, Richards now invites us to follow him across ‘an usual threshold at an unusual hour’, exploring nocturnal life on the streets of Westminster or on North Sea ferries, meeting wildlife preservationists carving out ‘dark corridors’ for bats, or investigating the damage done to our ‘finely balanced circadian timepieces’ by getting just a couple of hours of disturbed sleep.
From poorly paid social workers to hand-picked search-and-rescue crews, to Michael Fassbender playing millionaire boy racer, Overnight – to crib from one Night Mail review – creates adventure from things that happen every night of our lives. In this book about ‘love, care and service’ (with unavoidable pandemic overtones, given its time of writing), some of Richards’s subjects live for their work while others are more ambivalent. But all are doing jobs which aren’t your normal nine-to-five, often unpaid and rarely – pace Fassbender – with much glamour to them. Richards writes: ‘I am moved and comforted to know that people are watching over me during the hours of darkness’, or simply doing ‘things that need to be done before the rest of us awake’.
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