Literary Lesbians

Our discussion of The Night Watch started with a quote from Kay in the novel:

"People's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures."

This led into a discussion about Sarah Waters' use of tense in the novel. Although I think we all agreed that it was an interesting technique, and that in one sense it kept us in suspense while we were waiting to discover how the characters had ended up where they were in the start of the novel, most of us found it rather irritating. Interestingly, nearly everyone went back and read the beginning of the book again after finishing it.

We also discussed the way in which this book differed from Sarah Waters' earlier novels - particularly that one of the things we loved about her earlier books was the depth of description, which this book lacked. Amy pointed out that this could have been a stylistic choice to emphasize that in war time things were fairly bleak. Thanks also to Amy for introducing us to the phrase "classic technique of alienation" and its development by playwright Bertolt Brecht.

There was also some discussion about the role of the characters Viv and Duncan. Some thought they were superfluous to the story, others thought they needed to be there (there was some suggestion that Viv was the token 'straight' character, although I think we ended up dismissing this as a theory - Sarah Waters told Lynnie that she wrote books about characters, not "gay" characters).

Thanks also to Lynnie for sharing with us the in-depth and cutting edge details of Sarah Waters in person following her interview with her in 2006. This provided us with some good background about the author and her interpretation of her own work. We thought it particularly interesting that Sarah Waters said that she would never write a book set in her own era as she "lived that every day" and that she preferred to either write about stories set in the past, or ghost stories.

General consensus was that we didn't like Julia, were rather annoyed by Helen, but grew to love Kay.