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A review by korrick
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
3.0
2.5/5
This is not a work of deep introspection or rambling digression or intense imagery, and when those are lacking, I'm usually left with two points of engagement: plot, and character. Due to how easily I predict narrative twists these days, it's far easier for literature to achieve success in the latter category. I'm not asking for cartoon level villainy or heroism or the sort of troubled in-between type who usually functions as no more than an excuse for increasing levels of disability/mental illness/trauma porn, but some quirk or complex or singular fascination whose, in the case of this text, fully developed bequeathment all four of the main characters would have improved things enormously. Instead, what there was of that was either barely there or almost entirely libidinous in nature, so that I finished the work thinking that I would have rather that the 500+ pages be completely devoted to Kay, or maybe Kay + her women loving women cohorts, rather than all that other admittedly sensational but still rather lifeless character arcs. Despite what that sort of statement may imply, I wasn't that impressed with [b:Tipping the Velvet|25104465|Tipping the Velvet|Sarah Waters|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425892206l/25104465._SY75_.jpg|1013794] either, so perhaps Waters just isn't my kind of author. I liked the film adaptations I saw of both [b:Fingersmith|8913370|Fingersmith|Sarah Waters|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545241494l/8913370._SY75_.jpg|1014113] and [b:The Little Stranger|7234875|The Little Stranger|Sarah Waters|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407105269l/7234875._SY75_.jpg|5769396], but that may be where that "writing for television" comes in, and I'm not motivated enough in regards to either work to test this hypothesis out. Maybe someday in the future, especially if a work lends itself to one reading challenge or another, but after this second time around, I'm not feeling any more inclined than I was after the first.
In the end, the satisfaction I'll get from finally getting this book off my shelf, as well as checked off of a substantial number of lists in accordance with my usual prediction, ranks almost on the level of the satisfaction that I got from actually reading the work, and that's never a good sign. Once again, this is a work that relies too much on the hallowed aura of the WWII in one form or another to make up for its lacking, and it seems that that period when I paid attention to longlists and shortlists and the like was chockful of adaptations of that particular trope that still instinctively draws me in if I'm not careful about it. It makes me glad how I've gotten away from the crowd that feeds off of those sorts of hyped up collections that make their way across my dash around this time of year, as it's frustrating enough to deal with the remains of those peer-pressured years without clogging up my reading priorities with more recent developments. I've even refrained buying copies of certain works just to have the excuse to continue to pass over them without fully committing to removing the work from my TBR, especially if the all too common whiteness isn't mitigated at all by women's writing/queerhood/some other still infrequent factor in what tends to be institutionally raised up on the hierarchy of literary quality. Waters has enough works that I could easily return for a third time's the charm, even fourth time's for the stats, but my less than amazing experiences with what I've read so far, combined with a familiarity with the basic outlines/plot twists of the works I'm interested in and low ratings for the works that I'm not, means that I'm in no rush to give another chance to a relatively mainstream name when there are so many whom I haven't experienced at all. I'm glad she's doing her part in bringing history to life in a far more accurate way than the bulwark of historical fictions composed over the last 75 years tends towards, deconstructing that false conscience that all those "others" don't have a reason to exist until the 60s or later. For me, though, it just doesn't make for very engaging writing or even a credible learning experience, and when such writing averages out to 500+ pages per work, it's best I give it five, maybe ten, years before trying again. Pretty words and thoughts in places, but not nearly enough of that or another, or some of the more base self-indulgences, to merit the work running as long as it did and still leave the reader unsatisfied.
As if one's grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one's way over the rubble to the ground on the other side...There's a commonly espoused phrase that proclaims that, attempt to write for everyone, and you'll end up writing for no one. There's also the idea of "writing for television" that certainly serves a purpose in its correct venue, but, unless brilliantly done, has little place in the world of the written word. And then of course: show, not tell. At first, I appreciated much of this after the overwhelming pathos of certain works that are 95% the the successive soliloquies of a single self, but after a while, NW fumbled in all three areas, taking on too many timelines across too long a span that cram in so much of the doing rather than the telling that one thinks this cross-section of interlocking narratives would do better as a limited series put on by one enterprising streaming service or another. Not all of the characters are drawn equally in terms of how much they engage the reader, and the weaker ones tend to drag the whole narrative down into a barely differentiable mass of human weakness in the time of stiff upper lips to the point that, when something does happen, the climax is damped down by all the sitcom tedium that preceded it. The narrative conceit of three separate periods broken up by three year intervals steadily traveling back in time lent the work some kind of 'solving the mystery' type feel, but I'm not one for that sort of genre, not to mention that final revelations themselves ended up being less than what one had been led to expect. A stronger work would have started in 1947 and stuck there: it's not like flashbacks or beginning in media res haven't been part an parcel of fiction for millennia now, and experimentation's not the best if it simply leads to the work falling flat.
This is not a work of deep introspection or rambling digression or intense imagery, and when those are lacking, I'm usually left with two points of engagement: plot, and character. Due to how easily I predict narrative twists these days, it's far easier for literature to achieve success in the latter category. I'm not asking for cartoon level villainy or heroism or the sort of troubled in-between type who usually functions as no more than an excuse for increasing levels of disability/mental illness/trauma porn, but some quirk or complex or singular fascination whose, in the case of this text, fully developed bequeathment all four of the main characters would have improved things enormously. Instead, what there was of that was either barely there or almost entirely libidinous in nature, so that I finished the work thinking that I would have rather that the 500+ pages be completely devoted to Kay, or maybe Kay + her women loving women cohorts, rather than all that other admittedly sensational but still rather lifeless character arcs. Despite what that sort of statement may imply, I wasn't that impressed with [b:Tipping the Velvet|25104465|Tipping the Velvet|Sarah Waters|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425892206l/25104465._SY75_.jpg|1013794] either, so perhaps Waters just isn't my kind of author. I liked the film adaptations I saw of both [b:Fingersmith|8913370|Fingersmith|Sarah Waters|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545241494l/8913370._SY75_.jpg|1014113] and [b:The Little Stranger|7234875|The Little Stranger|Sarah Waters|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407105269l/7234875._SY75_.jpg|5769396], but that may be where that "writing for television" comes in, and I'm not motivated enough in regards to either work to test this hypothesis out. Maybe someday in the future, especially if a work lends itself to one reading challenge or another, but after this second time around, I'm not feeling any more inclined than I was after the first.
In the end, the satisfaction I'll get from finally getting this book off my shelf, as well as checked off of a substantial number of lists in accordance with my usual prediction, ranks almost on the level of the satisfaction that I got from actually reading the work, and that's never a good sign. Once again, this is a work that relies too much on the hallowed aura of the WWII in one form or another to make up for its lacking, and it seems that that period when I paid attention to longlists and shortlists and the like was chockful of adaptations of that particular trope that still instinctively draws me in if I'm not careful about it. It makes me glad how I've gotten away from the crowd that feeds off of those sorts of hyped up collections that make their way across my dash around this time of year, as it's frustrating enough to deal with the remains of those peer-pressured years without clogging up my reading priorities with more recent developments. I've even refrained buying copies of certain works just to have the excuse to continue to pass over them without fully committing to removing the work from my TBR, especially if the all too common whiteness isn't mitigated at all by women's writing/queerhood/some other still infrequent factor in what tends to be institutionally raised up on the hierarchy of literary quality. Waters has enough works that I could easily return for a third time's the charm, even fourth time's for the stats, but my less than amazing experiences with what I've read so far, combined with a familiarity with the basic outlines/plot twists of the works I'm interested in and low ratings for the works that I'm not, means that I'm in no rush to give another chance to a relatively mainstream name when there are so many whom I haven't experienced at all. I'm glad she's doing her part in bringing history to life in a far more accurate way than the bulwark of historical fictions composed over the last 75 years tends towards, deconstructing that false conscience that all those "others" don't have a reason to exist until the 60s or later. For me, though, it just doesn't make for very engaging writing or even a credible learning experience, and when such writing averages out to 500+ pages per work, it's best I give it five, maybe ten, years before trying again. Pretty words and thoughts in places, but not nearly enough of that or another, or some of the more base self-indulgences, to merit the work running as long as it did and still leave the reader unsatisfied.
Rum sort of job, isn't it? All dust. Not like the other war: that was all mud. Makes one wonder what the next one will be. Ashes, I expect...