The prizewinning novelist Sarah Waters enjoys subverting our expectations, telling tales of the illicit, stripping away our veneers of polite respectability. In Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet she laid bare a Victorian world of lesbian love, titillating her readers with the scurrilous idea that women could have had a good time without those bewhiskered men of empire. For her latest book, she has moved centuries, swapping bodices and ankle boots for slacks and silk pyjamas.
The Night Watch is set in 1940s London — rubble-strewn, cheerless, unrecognisable without its bustling crowds, street signs, railings. But this is not a novel about plucky heroines and the cheery community spirit which is supposed to have erupted during the Blitz. In the chaos of war, suggests Waters, there are plenty of opportunities for alternative behaviour to flourish — men on the move, women in trousers, everyday routines overturned.
Not everyone behaves better under duress.
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