Books & Poetry

Most novelists have a core of molten arrogance. But it’s a measure of Sarah Waters’ uncommon modesty that the phrase most often used to describe her books – ‘lesbian Victorian romps’ – was coined not by some dismissive reviewer but by the author herself.

A youthful 39-year-old whose kindly intellectual enthusiasm suggests she was formidable in her previous incarnation as an Open University lecturer, Waters is one of the few writers of her generation to combine critical acclaim with genuine popular appeal. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. ‘Affinity’, in which a young woman becomes obsessed with an imprisoned medium, won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2000. ‘Fingersmith’, her revisionist homage to Victorian ‘sensation’ novels like ‘The Woman in White’, was shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker prizes in 2002 but was also a bestseller and the second of her books, after her 1998 debut ‘Tipping the Velvet’, to be adapted for TV. At the last count she is published in 24 languages, including Chinese, Latvian, Hungarian, Korean and Slovenian. Feature continues

‘The Night Watch’, Waters’ first new novel in four years, is every bit as good as her others, even if it finds her operating some distance outside her comfort zone of Victorian slums, prisons and asylums. Formally, too, it’s a more complicated proposition. Starting in 1947 and working steadily backwards to 1941, it tells the story of four characters locked in complex, uncertain alignment: androgynous Kay, who drove an ambulance in the Blitz and has been scarred by what she witnessed; Helen, whose thriller-writer girlfriend, Julia, may or may not be having an affair; Viv, whose married lover still hasn’t left his wife for her; and fey Duncan, who lives with a sinister older man he calls ‘Uncle Horace’.

For all its moments of high drama – picking broken bodies out of the rubble; a botched back-street abortion – ‘The Night Watch’ is sedate and interiorised, more concerned with character than hairpin plotting, with the claustrophobia of long-term relationships than the thrill of sexual discovery. At the same time, it’s immediately recognisable as a Sarah Waters novel: perfectly pitched, and so involving you feel as if you’re mainlining it rather than merely reading.

‘That was something I couldn’t judge at all,’ says Waters, sipping hot chocolate in an Aldwych bar. ‘To me it just felt completely different in all sorts of ways. I could feel my prose style changing, the 1940s exerting this pressure I hadn’t anticipated over the whole shape of the book. I’ve always worked hard to capture idiom and tone, and I’ve got a slight anxiety that all I can do as a writer is ventriloquise, that I haven’t got a voice of my own.