![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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). ![]()
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