Lucy Beresford
Love Among The Rubble
War is a popular backdrop for novels, particularly love stories. The heightened emotions fuelled by apocalyptic conditions provide rich targets for a novelist’s searchlight. Waters has turned hers full beam onto London during and just after the Second World War, and in particular onto issues of cowardice and bravery. Par for the course, you might think, in war. But with Waters we have learned (from her earlier novels Fingersmith and Tipping The Velvet) to expect the unexpected.
The ‘twist’ (if one can call it that) in The Night Watch is Waters’s accomplished structure. Divided into three sections, it tells backwards the narratives of four loosely linked characters, and it is this inversion which invests the novel with its potency. Without betraying elements of the plot, I can
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger