The Night Watch

"Shortlist"

"I love this book. I first read it years ago, when it came out, and I read it again ten years ago. I also taught it for a while. I’ve just read it for the third time when I knew I was going to be talking to you. I finished it yesterday. It’s set during the Second World War and it’s mainly the story of this group of six women. They’re doing men’s jobs and have much more leeway than either before or after the war. So they’re working in factories, driving ambulances, being ARP wardens or firefighters—because there weren’t the men to do those jobs. Sarah Waters starts from the end of the story and we end at the beginning. When we meet all these characters, their story is the past. But it’s in front of us. For example, there is Kay, a butch, gay, very gallant woman, who is painted as very sexy. They all smoke like hell (which I don’t think is sexy). She rescues people. But by the time we meet her at the beginning of the story, she’s living in lodgings. She’s very lonely. She just watches people arriving and leaving from the house in which she lives. You’re opening the book at the beginning, but the beginning is the end. The Night Watch is so clever. It makes us look at the way the drama unpeels, as opposed to unfolds, if you like. We get to the ‘Oh, that’s why and that’s why and that’s why.’ It’s another way of looking at history, which I also thought was really interesting. Have you read it? It’s worth reading! It makes you think about memory, and decisions made that might be wrong, and if only we hadn’t made that decision, we wouldn’t have found ourselves here. There’s a certain level of fatalism because as you’re reading the story, you already know the ending. You know that nothing can change. Nothing that happens along the way can make a difference. It makes you think about life and where the decisions we’ve made have taken us. And how, when we look back at things, we see the point at which they happened. That’s exactly how we see our own lives. Ten years ago, I was there but I was always going to end up here. Because I’m here today. The concept has stayed with me all this time. I had no trouble choosing The Night Watch for this list because it’s so brilliant. In comparing these books, I could group Dominion and The Nightwatch together. They’re both stories around the Second World War, and they also both play with our understanding of reality. One is ‘what if?’ and the other one is, ‘because this happened, this had to happen. This is how we got here.’ One is more of a dissection of the present, and the other a reinterpretation of the future. They’re both very clever, in their different ways. It’s a bit like I was talking about with Sarah Waters. Often, I’ll pick up a book, read it, and discover it’s number seven (say) in a series. Then I’ll go back and find out what happened before. If people start with The Mystery of Yew Tree House and that makes them want to read the others, they’ve lost nothing by starting with number nine, not at all. They can go back and see how it all began. That’s what I would do. I write each book to be read as a standalone. It’s of itself. The Detective’s Daughter is partly set in 1981. The murder happened two days before Charles married Diana, so part of it is set then. A Kind of Vanishing was partly set in 1968. The Distant Dead and The Mystery of Yew Tree House have big chunks which are set in the Second World War. The Distant Dead is set during the Blitz in London and The Mystery of Yew Tree House is set in Sussex in 1940. Her name is Stella Darnell. Her father gave her an application form for the police when she was 18 and she tore it up. She never wanted to be a detective and did not want to follow him into the Metropolitan Police. She saw how it ruined her parents’ marriage. She never saw her father, he was always being called away. That wasn’t the life she wanted. So in lieu of something else to do, she starts cleaning, which she actually loves. She starts a cleaning company. By the time we meet her she has a successful cleaning company and has been doing it for years. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In the first book, her father has died. She meets Jack when she’s cleaning out her father’s house that she’s inherited and comes across an unsolved case of his from 1981. She starts investigating it. That’s how she meets Jack, who is investigating it too because it’s his mother’s death and he wants to find the person who did it and kill them. In the first few books, they’re just a very mismatched investigative duo. Other cases come their way by accident and design. But eventually they do get together. And by the time we reach The Mystery of Yew Tree House , they are together as a couple and there’s the question of whether they’ll live together. That’s where the story has got to. Yes, I started noticing them when I was a child, because we came down to Sussex for the holidays. I vaguely knew that they were used for firing a gun through but it’s really only in the last 18 months that I started wondering, ‘What was the reality of these dark, dank places?’ Sheep tend to take shelter in the one near us. Then, when I started reading about them, I was fascinated to learn about the building of them and how they were designed. Some of them are almost inaccessible, they’re so overgrown with brambles. Of course, I’m a crime writer so what I thought of doing was putting a body in one of them. I did a huge amount of research, partly because I just got so interested. Some of it is interviews, some of it walking the ground of where something is, and a lot of it is reading. I read this great big biography of Churchill and another biography of somebody who’d worked for Churchill. None of which has gone in the book, but what’s gone into the book is the sense of really belonging there, of really centering the past in that way, which, of course, is going back to the books I’ve chosen, what C.J. Samson and Hilary Mantel would have done to a greater extent than me. They really, really immerse themselves in the period. You could research forever, like Casaubon in Middlemarch . I’m not in that category, but I do miss doing research for the periods and subjects I’ve done in the past, including this one. I came across a review of a book about them. They were called ‘stay behinds’. If C.J. Sansom’s reality of a German takeover had happened, they were the ones in the underground bunkers, the guerilla army. They were volunteers, though that’s probably a bit of a loose term, I don’t think they had much of a choice. They were trained in brutal fighting techniques. Their instruction was to ‘butcher and bolt.’ They were incredibly brave because if a German invasion had come to pass, they would eventually have been killed in a horrible way. They were never able to talk about what they did, because they had signed the Official Secrets Act. They never got a pension or any recognition for what they did."