After putting a lesbian romp on the Booker shortlist, though, what's left to accomplish? Quite a bit, apparently. Though Waters's new novel, The Night Watch, may surprise her many fans—set in the forties, it's her first non-Victorian novel—it has so far delighted critics. The Washington Post called it "a sophisticated, beautifully written novel by a writer who has reached her maturity." "The story swings along irrepressibly," admired the Independent. And "this outstandingly gifted novelist releases her imagination into her most compelling depiction yet of women's struggles for various kinds of liberation" wrote the London Times. Perhaps this is familiar territory after all.

And, of course, it is. The Night Watch is not only artfully constructed (a Waters trademark) and beautifully written, it also manages to offer a fresh perspective on an era whose stockpile of stories had seemed all but used up. Set in London during and after the Battle of Britain, The Night Watch traces—in reverse—the stories of a handful of ordinary Londoners. But like all great novelists, as Waters delves into her characters lives, gradually revealing their longings, their fears, the peculiar paradoxes of their fates, they emerge as human beings, at once singular and universal—and quite extraordinary.
 

The Night Watch: A Novel by Sarah Waters "Readers will be tempted to return to the beginning of Waters' elegant novel after turning the final page to fully appreciate the depth of the characters and their connections to each other." Booklist List Price $24.95 Your Price: $10.95 (Used - Hardcover) More about this book/ check for other copies Fingersmith: A Novel by Sarah Waters "A marvelous pleasure....Waters's noted attention to historical detail and her beautifully sensitive dialogue help to anchor the force-five plot twisters." The Washington Post Book World List Price $15.00 Your Price: $7.95 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies Affinity: A Novel by Sarah Waters "Her first, Tipping the Velvet, was good; her second is just terrific....Affinity is two parts Wilkie Collins...and just a dash of Jeanette Winterson for up-to-the-minute lesbian-historical-fiction flavor." New York Magazine List Price $14.00 Your Price: $6.50 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters "This is the lesbian novel we've all been waiting for — a sexy, funny, sometimes deeply moving romp through the Victorian underworld, saturated with period detail and almost completely free of activist harangue." Peter Kurth, Salon List Price $15.00 Your Price: $9.95 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies

Farley: Your previous novels were all set in the Victorian era, and you've developed a reputation and a following as the world's greatest lesbian Victorian novelist. Why did you decide to leave that era, and why did you choose the forties?

Waters: Well, I decided to make a change because I felt I needed, or wanted a change more than anything. Those first three novels aren't a trilogy. But I felt that I had reached the end of a sort of cycle by the time I'd finished Fingersmith. I wanted to see what would happen to my writing, I suppose, if I did move, given that they were the only novels that I'd ever written, and I was necessarily sort of ventriloquizing Victorian voices. I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen.

Something about the postwar period initially attracted me. I'd never wanted to go back further than the Victorian period, and I didn't want to come into the present either. So the forties seemed like this kind of interesting point that was kind of half-way between us and the Victorians, I suppose, but a very different landscape. Of course, following the war, you know, it was, physically, a very shattered landscape. I quite liked that idea, of exploring wartime London after the war had ended. Actually as the book fell into place and as I researched the war, I ended up going back into the war as well, even though I hadn't quite anticipated this at the start. I got very sort of captivated by the war and its impact on daily life.

Farley: Writing about the new book, one reviewer pointed out that, unlike the Victorian era, the forties have no camp.

Waters: That's right. Yes. There were lots of new things to take on with this book, and, actually, that was one of them. You know, not just moving period, but all that that entailed in terms of style and idiom. Certainly one of the things I loved about writing about the Victorian period was the campness, the extravagance, the melodrama, the gothicness. I hadn't really realized what it would be like not to have that style any more. So it was quite unnerving for a long time to have to give all that up and see my own writing become a lot more pared down and a bit chillier or something. Because The Night Watch is written in the third person I think that helped make it a little bit less emotional in tone than the first person confessional narrative of the other books. So I got to like it, but it was a challenge at first, giving up the camp.

Farley: It's also a very pivotal period, WWII.

Waters: Yeah. Absolutely. One of the things I liked about the period was that it seemed to me to be this point where lots and lots of modern things were being put in place, about sexuality, apart from anything else. Ideas about homosexuality—very modern ideas about homosexuality—were first being put in place, really. And heterosexuality, for that matter. One of the things I came to like about the forties was this sense that things sort of changed. It was this hinge point. A different kind of modernism was being put in place after the war.

In Britain, you know, it was really the death of the old class system. You know, after the war nobody wants to be servants any more. The war really shook things up. It introduced people to different kinds of ideas and things. For women, war was a dreadful time. But it was also a fantastically exciting time for lots of women. I think in that sense it lead straight into the sixties and seventies. There was an attempt to return to conservatism I think in the fifties, but there was a real forward energy that grew out of the changes of the war.

Farley: You have this image of the whole city being literally torn apart by bombs, but also of the social structure being, at least temporary, shattered. And for a time, it was possible to live outside of conventions.

Waters: Yeah, ordinary rules being suspended for awhile. Certainly at the time the impression I got from reading diaries and novels and watching films from the time was that people really felt that having been through the war the very least that they could expect to achieve from it was a new society, a radically new society, which I don't really think they got, to the extent that they hoped they would. But it was a time of great possibility, I think, for a little awhile. And certainly for lesbians and gay men it was a time when the ordinary pressures of "the norm" had all gone out the window. So, again, it was really a quite interesting time.

Farley: You've said that in many ways gays and lesbians were more buttoned up in the forties than in the Victorian period.

Waters: Yes. That was really interesting, because, I'd sort of expected that in moving into the forties my gay characters would suddenly have a lot more confidence and be a lot more liberated than my Victorian gay characters. And actually quite the opposite was true.

My sense of queer life in the Victorian period is that it was relatively secret, but that its secrecy ensured its freedom in a funny sort of way, you know that things could flourish in very small pockets, or strata, of society. Whereas, by the forties lesbian and gay men were much more visible. They had pubs; they had hangouts; they had a community and a sense of fashion. Things like that. But at the same time, their very visibility made them targets in a new way for homophobia. Gay men were especially vulnerable to blackmail and arrest and imprisonment. And I came across cases of women losing their jobs because it had been discovered that they were gay. Or being kicked out of their flats, or losing kids, or being sent to psychiatrists. I think that made it a much more fearful time for lesbians and gay men. So my characters ended up being a lot more nervous and cautious.

Farley: You have used prison as a setting in your novels more than once. And it struck me that prison is also a place where you are outside of society, outside of standard social conventions. Do you think that that is why you are drawn it?

Waters: I don't know, really. I do keep coming back to prisons. For this novel one of the first things that got me writing about the prison was that I came across a reference to somebody talking about having been in prison during an air raid and how terrifying it was, you know, with the warden just disappearing and leaving you to it locked in your cell. And a number prisons were hit by bombs. So that was my starting point. It was something I'd never thought about before. But of course people were in prisons during air raids during the war.

But it wasn't so much that sort of marginality, or that prison is a place of transgression or subversion. I don't know what it was. I became aware as I was writing that there were things going on in the novel around space. On the one hand, London was being literally blown open as you were saying. And people were having to share spaces—intimate spaces—with strangers and having to get used to that. It was very hard I think to find space of your own. I was intrigued to think about how prison fitted into that when you, on the one hand, had to share very intimate spaces like toilets and things like that with people in cells. You know what I mean? There was something across the novel about space, and who was in control of it, and whether you could be in control of it yourself or not. And the war kind of challenging all of that.

Farley: Do you think that is something you explore specifically in this novel, or is it a recurring theme in your work?

Waters: I think it is a recurring theme. Obviously, there was a prison in my second novel Affinity, an asylum in Fingersmith. I mean, even in Tipping the Velvet there is a sequence where Nancy, my main character, is kept sort of a prisoner by her mistress. I think I have a slightly pathological thing about my own space. I like to be in control of it. So the idea of somebody else being able to lock you up, or lock you out, or, alternatively, to push you into contact with other people, I find quite horrible. Or, at least, very interesting. So I think that's why I want to explore it.

Farley: Women have also been, traditionally, far more confined than men.

Waters: Yes, definitely. I mean, middle and upper middle class women in the nineteenth century— you know, you couldn't just go for a walk like men could. Going for a walk for me is one of the core pleasures of my life. Having that liberty to just do that, and walk through a city, in the flâneur tradition. You know, just walk. The idea that you couldn't do that I find really quite horrible. That you had to be chaperoned everywhere is quite horrid, isn't it, really?

Farley: In the forties, as this new gay identity emerging, language is also developing to talk about gay people.

Waters: You mean the word gay? That wasn't really being used in the forties.

Farley: How about the word lesbian?

Waters: The word lesbian has been used for a while, actually, from at least the eighteenth century, at least in that very specific way. But it was used in a very isolated kind of way. But it gradually just crept more an more into public usage.

Farley: But most people didn't think in those terms. In Fingersmith, they don't think, "Oh, we must be lesbians."

Waters: No, you're right.

Farley: They don't have this awakening to a sense of a new identity.

Waters: Again, that's one of the things that made my Victorian characters less anxious about their sexual identity. As I kind of imagine the world of the 1860s, there wasn't that kind of popular consensus about sexuality. Falling in love with another girl, kissing another girl: today it just means—it equals—I'm a lesbian. Or, You're a lesbian. It just didn't do that in the nineteenth century.

But by the forties it did. It was post-The Well of Loneliness trial, which was in 1928. It was a very different sort of cultural landscape. There was beginning to be a psychoanalytic model of sexuality as well. People were getting into psychoanalysis a bit, complexes and that sort of thing. So there was a new vocabulary around sexuality.

But it's interesting. There's a guy called Denton Welsh, who was a writer and a painter from the period. And he'll talk about someone being "butch," for example. But, you know, he'll put it in inverted commas. And another writer, Peter Wildwood, in one of his memoirs uses the word gay, but again puts it in inverted commas. So it was a moment when all the terms that we take for granted were just beginning to emerge. As, I suppose, the kind of gay community we would recognize was beginning to emerge. But it was a period too in which there were slightly older traditions of queerness as well.

Farley: So today gays and lesbian are being rapidly accepted in ways that they haven't before. The idea of gay marriage is on the table, which is a step toward being actually welcomed into the fabric society, which has not been available to gays and lesbians in the past. But some gay people really resist this. They see living outside the social order as liberating, as an advantage. From this perspective, becoming a part of the straight social order is a step backwards. Do you feel this way at all?

Waters: Well, I do feel there is a bit of a tradeoff. Not so much that I'm nostalgic for a time when gay people were outlaws. Because I think it's very easy to over-romanticize that. But I do think that lesbian and gay men have always been good at forming long lasting partnerships. I have friends who have been together for a long time. In the UK they're beginning to have civil partnerships. And it's fantastic. It's very moving. And it does feel something like, At last! Suddenly they're allowed to make a kind of formal, public statement about something they've been doing perfectly brilliantly for many years. That's wonderful.

But at the same time, I think lesbians and gay men have also been very good at forming slightly unorthodox domestic arrangements. You know what I mean? They've been very good at having extended families, different kinds of families, or being single, or having lots of partners. You know what I mean? I do worry that this is going to get slightly lost, that we're going to have to become?

Farley: That the range of options will get narrowed down to just one or two options.

Waters: Yes.

Farley: You have said that you work out your plots ahead of time, then go in a work out the characters within the plot. Do you ever find, working that way, that your characters take on a life of their own and you have to adapt the plot to the characters?

Waters: Well, that was my writing experience with the first three novels, that I had the plot worked out in advance. And those novels were increasingly complex, plotwise, so I really had to have it worked out in advance. But I didn't ever get to a point where as I got to know my characters it made me change the plot.

But what did happen that was interesting was that I sort of merrily devised these plots that required my characters to do terrible things to each other. And then, as I began to flesh the characters out, to empathize with them or enter into their emotional lives, I realized how they felt about what I needed them to do, which was often not very happy. Which was actually quite interesting, though sometimes it made me feel awful. But it was quite a good way of writing, because if there's conflict there, conflicts of feeling, it's really quite fertile.

So, no, I never had a character make me change the plot. But The Night Watch did have a different kind of process to it, very much so. It's not so plot driven. It's much more character driven. So I had to figure out my characters and their stories as I went along, which was very unsettling for me, because it's not how I'm used to working. I had the basic characters, and I had the backwards structure?

Farley: So you started with the backwards structure?

Waters: I didn't start initially with that, actually. I knew I was very interested in the postwar setting. But my characters?I didn't really know what to do with them. What interested me in them was the fact that they were tired, that they all had pasts, and that they were all getting over stuff. But that meant that I couldn't really move them forward because they were all rather stuck. The interesting thing happened when I realized that maybe I shouldn't try to move them forward. Maybe I should try to talk about what had happened to them. So that's when the backwards movement fell into place.

Farley: At the end of the chronological story, the characters are all sort of worn out and adrift. By setting it backwards, the novel gains momentum in an unusual way, because by going back, you are going towards a more dynamic stuff.

Waters: Yes. I knew it was quite a leap of faith writing it that way, because I knew readers would have to stay with me through that first section, when it isn't clear what's going to happen, and when there isn't much narrative pace. There's lots of sitting around and conversations. So it made it a more challenging novel to write, because I had to figure it out as I went along, and that usually meant working out what was going to go in the scene by writing it. So I'd write it, and then I'd have to rewrite it. Or, often, I'd abandon a scene. Or I'd try scenes in different orders. I did that a lot. So I've got loads and loads of rewritten scenes, or rejected scenes, or first drafts, second drafts, tenth drafts. It was a really labor intensive novel.

Farley: More than the others?

Waters: Yes, much more.

Farley: There seems to be a pattern in your novels: one fun, one serious, one fun, one serious.

Waters: It's funny isn't it. And I can feel myself now. With the next book I'm determined to write something that's a bit more upbeat. But, you know, when I've finished that, I'll quite possibly be interested in going down into something a bit more melancholy again. It has worked like that for me. You know, it was precisely from having written Tipping the Velvet, with its very very rompy feel, that made me want to write something much darker with the next book. And then that was a gloomy book to write. What I always forget is that writing about characters who are unhappy is quite miserable, actually, especially with a novel like Affinity, which was set in a women's prison. It was a very gloomy world to have to go into every day. Whereas with Tipping and Fingersmith, it was all about thinking about how my characters were moving forward and the devious plots they were involved it. It was very exciting. In The Night Watch, though, there was again lots of sadness in the book, and lots of loss, and I had to enter into that. And it was really quite hard going.

Farley: As you've become more successful, I'm curious how your success has changed the experience of writing.

Waters: There was a point, when I finished Fingersmith and I was starting with Night Watch when I really noticed a change. You know, Fingersmith did well, and then Tipping the Velvet was on TV, and suddenly I had a lot more demands on my time. But it was at the very point when I felt I should be getting on with The Night Watch, and it was being difficult and not falling into place at all. It was really troubling.

I knew that part of what was making the writing difficult was that I just didn't have stretches of time to write in. I'm the sort of person who you can give two afternoons a week. It's not much use to me. My writing week tends to have a kind of arc to it. You know, Monday's difficult. Tuesday's a bit better. I usually peak about Thursday. And then Friday's kind of wearing down a bit. I just need long stretches of time to write in. And I just wasn't getting that because I was traveling, or giving interviews, or whatever. Now I understand that when a book comes out, there's going to be a long period of business. I've deliberately not even started to devote myself to thinking about the next book at all. I do have an idea, but not being able to work on it will just make me stressful. So I've learned to balance writing time with other kinds of work. Because it is work, just a different kind. But the writing time needs to be preserved. It's absolutely crucial. If that stops, then all the other stuff will stop, too. And it's also what I want to be doing.

I'd like to be able to wear it all a bit more lightly, though. Perhaps it just takes time. Because if I have an event on an evening, for example. When I'm at home—not when I'm on tour obviously—it kind of just, somehow, takes up the whole day. Even if it's just washing my shirt, you know. . . It would be nice just to be able to kind of do things lightly and then get back to writing.

But you also want to do the best you can, and I do say yes to things.But I think I should cultivate more of a self-protective kind of thing.

Farley: Do you think you'll write a contemporary novel one of these days?

Waters: I haven't any plans to at the moment. And I used to think that I probably never would, because, you know, history was my way into writing fiction and that was my thing. And maybe it always will be. But it's quite possible a story will come along that I want to write that has a contemporary setting. I may also get to the point where I think, actually, I'd like to try that now, to see what happens. I can see that happening. But not just yet.

Farley: I'm curious how it was having your stuff turned into film.

Waters: It was great, actually. It was the same production company both times, and it was a really positive experience. They were clearly very into the books and got script writers on board who were very enthusiastic about the novels. So that was reassuring right from the start. Once I handed it over, I didn't have any kind of creative input. But I didn't really want any creative input because I'd already moved on to another book. My mind was elsewhere. So I was just very very happy to just watch the process. And, yeah, it was great. It was exciting. TV is exciting. And meeting actors and actresses was great fun.

Farley: And it's wonderful that they would produce a story with lesbian themes for such a broad audience.

Waters: Yes. With Tipping the Velvet in particular that was amazingly exciting because it really felt like a bit of an event. We'd had good quality lesbian stuff on TV before, like, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Portrait of a Marriage, but they were pretty rare. And Tipping was very upbeat. It was sexier. You know, it had the dildo in it and things like that. It felt like a bit of a first in many ways. I felt really kind of proud to be involved in something like that.

Farley: Makes me think of Brokeback Mountain has also been such a phenomenon here. Has it been as big in the UK?

Waters: Well, I don't know how big it has been here, but it's been very well received in the UK and become a bit of a benchmark in lots of ways. It seems like that's happened here.

Farley: It's amazing how many people I've met who feel they have been really changed in some way by that movie.

Waters: It's funny, isn't it, because it is a great film. But I feel like it's something more. The response has been bigger than it might have been. I think so often with these things it's about timing. I think this happened with Tipping the Velvet to a certain extent. It's no big deal really, but somehow it just? I think what happens is that they come along just after the point when it's become utterly okay for mainstream audiences. And so to a mainstream audience it's both like This is exciting, and like, This is perfectly normal. What's the big deal?