Tilting the Tables 
 Two or three pages into this, I was already basking in Sarah Waters' magnificent sense of interior life. Although writing entirely in the third person, she has the wonderful ability to get inside her protagonist, her feelings, her fears, and her desires. This is a long novel (564 pages), but a concentrated one. Its effective cast is small: four people in a shabby-genteel house in South London. Even when it opens out onto a wider stage at the end, its feeling remains that of chamber drama, closeted and confined, though extraordinarily rich within those secret spaces. 
 It is 1922. Frances Wray lives with her mother in a substantial house in Champion Hill, a well-to-do neighborhood in Camberwell. Her brothers have been killed in the War; her father has died of natural causes, leaving behind a trail of debts that has forced the women to dismiss their servants and take in lodgers, or "paying guests" as they prefer to call them. These are a young couple, Len and Lil Barber; he is an insurance clerk in the City; she spends her time decorating their rooms with colorful gewgaws that show a certain flair, if little taste. For this being a British novel, there is of course a subtext of class. Hard up though they may be, Frances and her mother are gentry; Len and Lil belong to what is several times referred to (without apology) as "the clerk class," lower middle class to their upper. It is only one of a number of factors that tilt the tables in the house, though adding spice to whatever games may be played on them. For it goes without saying that Frances will get involved with her lodgers, young people like herself after all, and that this involvement will bring passion and devastation in its wake. 
 Stop here if you don't want to know the nature of that involvement, though those familiar with the author will know. 
 (view spoiler)[Those who have read Sarah Waters before will know that she is drawn to lesbian subjects, and so not be surprised that Frances will be attracted to Lillian, honoring her by using her full name. I was conscious all along of the extraordinary balancing act that this demands from the author. She is as far as possible from wanting to titillate. Even her descriptions of physical sex are intended to express the overwhelming power of emotional passion--or, in one striking scene towards the end, the barriers to passion. For her, clearly, love between women is a heaven-sent miracle, natural and in every way normal. And yet, to create a story, she has to emphasize its less normal aspects. The love story that occupies the first half of the book would be difficult to write in a heterosexual context without the risk of triteness, but the spice of transgression lends it a freshness that speaks again to all of us, regardless of orientation. At the same time, it creates a sinister foreboding that hangs over everything, a knowledge that if there are secrets in one aspect of their lives, there may well be other secrets lying in wait to ambush them. And when disaster strikes and they find themselves embroiled in a notorious trial, the secrecy of their relationship puts them into an almost insoluble moral quandary. I started the novel leisurely exploring the interior life of its main character; I ended it reading breathlessly for a hundred pages at a stretch, unable to put it down until I could find--or rather, the author could find--some ending that was both ethically acceptable and true to its time. She did, although there may be some who question the ethics; the lives of women in Waters' world seldom have neat endings. (hide spoiler)] 
 Waters is known as a writer of historical fiction. The Victorian setting is very important to her earlier novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith. 
 The Night Watch 
 is set during and after the London Blitz (and surely an influence on Kate Atkinson's 
 Life After Life 
 ). The Little Stranger, her novel before this one, is set in the aftermath of the Second World War. So the choice of 1922 is not a casual one here. I thought I heard deliberate echoes of 
 Mrs Dalloway 
 in a morning walk that Frances takes through London early in the novel, and just as it is in Woolf, the precariousness of the postwar world is a subtle but important theme. There are references to the number of out-of-work ex-servicemen around the streets and the decline in public safety generally supposed to result from it. Men who have not fought tend to be defensive and insecure; there is not a single strong male character in the book. Women have got the vote, and many have taken jobs for the first time, but they are still in an anomalous position, unable to take full control of their own lives. [Feminists might reply that most still can't.] In such a world of faded promise, it is not merely Waters's particular female characters that have the tables tilted against them, but women everywhere.