In Which Sarah Waters Teaches Me That There Doesn't Need To Be a Beginning or an End.

I have this fascination with wartime London. Sure there was the blitz and sugar rations, but there was also red lipstick, seamed stockings, touring American soldiers, desperate love affairs, women re-building Waterloo Bridge and all Londoners getting through their days with style and careless bravado--all to stick it to the forces of darkness, that horrid old Jerry.

I think it's hard to imagine a society where we would all pull together like that and just get on with it as so many did. That's partly why we're inundated with post-apocalyptic films and programs. Us lot are trying to wrap our minds around a time where hope and happiness were in short supply and yet, people made the best of it as they could. Hard to comprehend in our modern age of instant gratification and creature comforts. Can you imagine sleeping overnight in an underground station with hundreds of your neighbours? Without losing your cool or demanding to speak to someone in charge?

In reading Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, London in the '40s has never been made more vivid and richly arrayed before my mind. The devil is in the details they say, but it's the details in this novel that really sink into you and grab hold. Like the unsung details of the men and women who joined the ambulance service of London, working nights and careening through bombed out streets at the call of sirens and direct hits, bringing in the wounded and dead. Suddenly, the Blitz is more than an thing, more than buildings collapsing and London being blacked out. But it was something that happened to people and homes, not just the city and bricks and mortar. Real living people stuck in the middle of a lousy war, never sure that it will ever end.

Besides the usual sense of this wartime generation seemingly unflinchingly taking on hardship and harrowing circumstances, what surfaces is the corresponding effect on the characters that had never crossed my mind before. Namely, that this generation had nothing to lose really and knew it. Accepting that you could die overnight in a direct hit or via fire, flooding, etc, gave you a cold comfort: the psychological license to living as you wanted and to make decisions that might normally have given you pause. In Sarah Waters' hands, this slice of time is not simply the stuff of history books, but a life that belonged to many. And for that fleshing out, I doff my cap to you, Ms. Waters.

However, The Night Watch reminded me of what I needed and always need reminding of. Beginnings and endings, exposition and linear narrative--these are not the only way to tell a story. These are aspects that can shape a story, but sometimes a story shapes itself. Honestly, I feel more unsettled upon finishing a novel like The Night Watch, than I would over a standard story-line where we begin with so-and-so and follow more or less along to the tidy little end. From the first page, you are already at the end and as the chapters go along, you are taken layer under layer through the characters' intertwining past, first 1947, then 1944, and finally 1941. And while you finish at 'the beginning,' you are really no closer to knowing it all. And if anything, that is the hardest for me to accept. I NEED to know. To the point that I will obsess over it for a few weeks, trying to sift through what was written, hoping to find clues to what wasn't. But that's good literature, isn't it? Provocative and compelling. Haunting and niggling. And frankly, that's also life. There aren't always clear answers.

So, on a personal level, whenever I think of writing, I should not turn away from an idea because I cannot see a beginning or an end. Or even a linear narrative. Because nothing is ever that tidy.