BooksReviewSarah Waters's change of era makes her fourth novel, The Night Watch, a triumph, says Justine Jordan

The Night Watch
by Sarah Waters
480pp, Virago, £16.99

After three brilliant, much-loved novels about Victorian underworlds and young women discovering and reinventing their identities, Sarah Waters has turned to the second world war and its aftermath for her fourth. Having won critical acclaim and a passionate following for her genre of "lesbian Victorian romp", as she once chirpily described it, it's a brave move to exchange the petticoats for an austerity cut.

But the bigger jump is from the first person to the third; Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith were all narrated as the urgent, intimate confidences of their young heroines, seizing our attention and sympathies from page one ("Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster?" "I was never so frightened as I am now" - first lines are a Waters forte). The Night Watch, by contrast, is related at a dispassionate, slightly poised remove through the eyes of four main characters who are linked by their experiences in wartime London. And whereas Waters's last book, the Booker-shortlisted Fingersmith, hinged on a plot twist so satisfyingly sharp as to make the reader cry out in surprise and turn back to the beginning, The Night Watch's structural engine is a reverse chronology that recedes from the exhausted present of 1947 back through the intense bombardments of 1944 to the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1941. Thus we leave her characters as we meet them; and it is we, not they, who feel older, wiser and sadder at the novel's end.

Kay, in search of diversion for her empty postwar hours, often enters a cinema halfway through the film, so watching the second half first - "I almost prefer them that way - people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures." Waters's topsy-turvy time scheme is an elegant and profound device which imbues much of the novel with a poignant dramatic irony and turns every incident, however humdrum, into a revelation that helps to illuminate how her characters became the people they are (Waters is a mystery writer, and here the mystery is the jigsaw of identity, amassed piece by piece). However, it does make the first section of the novel curiously unrooted, as we step into lives that seem to float in limbo. Though it's a struggle for the reader to engage, this listlessness is part of Waters's design; her characters are drained, disappointed people struggling on in the aftermath of trauma, a stale existence in which even the headscarves, "decorated with faded tanks and spitfires", are left over from the war.

We first meet Kay as she steps out into a day that "seemed limp, suddenly: not fine so much as dried out, exhausted. She thought she could feel dust. . ." Duncan, who sees her standing blankly at her window like some Victorian madwoman in an attic, thinks of her as "one of those women . . . who'd charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over"; passers by look at her men's clothes and jeer: "Don't you know the war's over?" For the war had been her finest hour; as an ambulance driver, out on the grisliest jobs, she'd been "awake, alert, alive in all her limbs", a woman who felt like a man, able to be a hero. Now she has nothing to do but walk the streets, contemplating her loss of love and purpose.

Duncan - "a fey-looking boy", Kay considers, as she looks down from her attic - is also in limbo, old beyond his years, living in twee suburban seclusion with a mysterious "uncle", wincing from his past, a bundle of stifled desires and panic attacks. There's comfort in his relationship with his sister, Viv, who has continued an affair with a married man beyond its natural span, so that the subterfuges have soured and his whispered urgencies become stagey and unbelievable. She works at a lonely-hearts bureau - patching up more war damage - with Waters's fourth main character, Helen, who sees "something disappointed" about the handsome, self-possessed Viv - "A sort of greyness. A layer of grief, as fine as ash, just beneath the surface". Helen is a beautifully drawn portrait of emotional neediness, her calm public face masking the snarl of jealousy and insecurity she directs at her writer lover, Julia.

Not much happens in the book's first section: desultory, guarded conversations; picnics; ordinary life beautifully described - the "chill, bitter, marvellous" taste of beer in a porcelain cup. There are tiny hints and foreshadowings, throughout - that the nervy Duncan must "blink and look away" even from the turning key in a tin of ham "producing a line of exposed meat like a thin pink wound"; the gold ring that Viv, gripped in the memory of something terrible, takes from its hiding place. But these hints, along with the book's emotional weight, do not really come alive without a second reading, when we feel the full tragedy of Kay's lonely afterlife, the symbolic power of that gold ring.

As Waters has deftly made her entire novel into a series of slowly uncovered secrets, one is loath to reveal the surprises of 1944, but this middle section makes up the dramatic heart of the book. There's a tender poignancy to Viv's assignations with Reggie - we hear the same endearments, but this time in the flush of genuine passion - and then a bitter poignancy when he assures her, "You wait until after the war . . . It'll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time." Waters's portrait of London under attack is superb, and she is unsparing in her descriptions of the deaths and mutilations Kay and fellow ambulance driver Mickey attend on the night watch. The city also becomes a dramatic backdrop to emotional upheavals, as two women begin their affair with an eerie midnight walk during an air raid through deserted, bombed-out streets by the river and St Paul's, the sense of "exposed ground, unnatural space" pressing in on them with mounting tension until they come together in the flash of explosions. But the bloodiest episodes are personal: an illegal abortion that is almost unreadable in its power, the act of violence in Duncan's past.

"We might all be dead tomorrow," remarks Viv, and of course the heightened atmosphere of wartime licenses the expression of desire. "So many impossible things were becoming ordinary, just then," as Helen remarks of her first relationship with a woman; class and wealth divisions are also corroded, now that "we all dress like scarecrows, and talk like Americans". In the 40s, Waters has found a historical period of transformation as fertile as the Victorian era of her previous books, and as ripe for her project of writing lesbians back into history. Her ability to bring the times to life is stunning, whether through smell - the "talcum powder, permanent waves, typewriter ink, cigarette smoke, BO" of the typing pool, the "unwashed feet, sour mops, bad food, bad breath" of prison - or through her minute enumerations of her characters' physical lives. There is much face-washing, teeth-cleaning and kettle-boiling carefully described, alongside the illicit sex and bodily peril; Waters brings such a clear-eyed honesty and fresh interest to the everyday that she could probably make drying paint a lively read.

The Night Watch demands sticking power and at least two readings, but this finely nuanced, wise and generous novel more than repays such attention. Waters is an author to cherish, and this is probably her finest achievement yet.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpZ29nlpqvcHyTaJ2im6SevK960pqpmqCnlsGmvtI%3D