A Book in Reverse

Sarah Waters has switched gears. Her latest novel, The Night Watch, is a departure from her first three: instead of her reader-tested Victorian settings, she's jumped to the 1940s. Her mainstay of one or two central protagonists has evolved into an ensemble of characters. Oh, yeah — and the novel's narrative moves backwards in time. "It did feel like a leap of faith," reflects Waters, 39, eating satsumas in her publisher's London office. Her manner is almost shy, but she exudes a palpable self-possession. "I thought," she says, with a hint of wistfulness to her smile, "as much as I've loved staying in the 19th century, maybe it would be interesting to have a change."

Stark as the differences are, the acute sense of period and themes of lesbian love and relationships unfolding that distinguished Waters' earlier work get full play in this vivid, compassionate re-creation of 1940s London, which starts postwar and reverses into the Blitz. Her characters seem to be taking life one day at a time. Jealousy-riddled Helen and flighty Julia are lovers — but for how long? Helen's ex, Kay, after being fully incorporated into the war effort as an ambulance driver, finds herself marginalized for her sexual preferences. Vivien, who runs a lonely-hearts agency with Helen, worries about her brother, Duncan, recently released from prison. The book opens in 1947, jumps to 1944 and then back again to 1941, because Waters began a story set in postwar London, but found herself "completely sucked into" her research on the war. "I thought that actually what's interesting here for me is not where the characters are going, but what's happened to them." Besides, she's always been intrigued by backward narratives, such as Martin Amis' Time's Arrow and Harold Pinter's Betrayal. She'd considered using the form for an earlier novel but "it got too complicated. [For Night Watch] it suddenly made sense."

Waters maintains her trademark plot-twisting — the full connections between some of the characters aren't revealed until the reader meets them in 1941 — and her attention to detail. She focuses on seemingly ordinary things that were luxuries at the time — a birthday orange, tins of meat, gin gimlets — to bring home a sense of the austerity of the period and the extraordinary situations Londoners found themselves in. Her meticulous revivals range from the mundane ("Their stockings were darned at the toes and heels. Their shoes were scuffed; everybody's were") to the shocking ("What amazed her … was the smallness of the piles of dirt and rubble to which even large buildings could be reduced"). The novel's ultimate theme, though, is the damage that war inflicts beyond the front lines, the way that it scars the personalities even of civilians.

It's an impressive departure for Waters. Born in Wales, she arrived in London in the late '80s armed with an M.A. in English Literature, and spent a couple of years working in a bookshop and libraries in order to "stay close to books." She developed an interest in lesbian and gay genre fiction, and completed a Ph.D. on gay and lesbian historical fiction. Her associated research into London's colorful demimonde of music halls and vaudeville led directly to her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), a picaresque romp — and an unabashedly lesbian love story. "Writing it was a breeze," she recalls with a grin. "I wrote it in about 18 months, right after I finished my Ph.D."

Her second novel, Affinity, followed in 1999, delving into the 19th century worlds of spiritualism and women's prisons, and then Fingersmith, the fiendishly clever appropriation of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, in 2003. All three have been critically and commercially well-received, appealing to a wide variety of readers, prize judges and drama producers who have turned both Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith into successful bbc adaptations. Often touted as a role model in the lesbian literary tradition, Waters is quick to acknowledge one of her immediate forerunners. "Jeanette Winterson is someone who had a huge effect," she says, "because she was writing clearly lesbian literature with literary ambitions as well. Her novels are good literary models. I think suddenly lesbian writers thought, 'Yeah, we can write ambitious novels, not just lesbian detective fiction.'" Waters says her next book, too, will be set in the 20th century. Looks like she's left the Victorian petticoats behind for good.