Sarah Waters: The Night Watch

Sarah Waters’ novel The Nightwatch is dramatised tonight. I must confess I started the novel when it was first published  and then abandoned the experience, disappointed by the careful restraint and austerity of setting and character.

Waters was brave enough to challenge herself to explore this new historical setting after the highly successful Victorian settings of her previous novels, Fingersmith, Affinity and Tipping the  Velvet.

Thriller-Romp seemed to have been replaced by miserable- repression and I felt cheated somehow!

Of course I admit that austerity is less attractive to me and Fingermith remains one of the most enjoyable modern novels I have ever read. How many novels can make you literally GASP with a twist that send you reeling with surprise?  I am also a huge Dickens’ fan, so the idea that Sarah Waters readdressed the Victorian novel with an explicity passionate lesbian romance that ends happily unlike Dickens’ Little Dorrit seems an act of most tender transformation.

I am reminded in Fingersmith of Dickens’ unfinished final text, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where a powerful romantic attraction between women is interwoven with a murder plot and ‘thriller’.

So I shall record and watch The Night Watch and see if austerity has its own pleasures too!

Tags: anchoring, Confidence, English Tuition, reading for confidence, Tuition private english tuition Bolton Manchester, word pools

Posted in Book Club, Book Reviews, Favourite Books?, General blog Chat, Reading Diary, Reading for Life!