Beginning in 1947, this novel traces the lives of four interconnected Londoners back through time into the Blitz. I’m a complete tragic for anything set in this time and place, so it’s no surprise that I ripped through it quite happily. As an example of Waters’s work, it’s relatively typical, though certainly not her best (probably The Little Stranger or Fingersmith, though I can’t claim to have read them all). The reverse chronological is the perfect mechanism for this particular plot, and it makes me wonder which she decided on first, format or content; I like to imagine her coming up with the story and then, in a flash of 2am inspiration, realising how much more effective it could be if the flux, so to speak, were reversed.
So the main characters are three women and a man, two gay, two (presumed) straight, and all of them are called upon, in one way or another, to navigate their conflicts with the prevailing morality of 1940s England. The male character is, in my mind, the weakest of them, and since he spends the middle chunk of the text in prison (no spoiler there), he has the least interesting story, with a lot of lying around in his bunk listening to bombs. The romantic complexities of the three women are interesting and, at times, uncomfortable (in true Waters style, there’s a lesbian love triangle in there that will end with at least one of them, if not all, being hurt). My main interest was in Kay, one of the female characters, who drove an ambulance during the war, and whose experiences provide all of the action and most, honestly, of the interest.
Waters has a gift for sniffing out historical counter-narratives, which gives interest and richness to her novels and lifts them out of the ordinary run of historical dramas. I’m not thinking just of the obvious example of sexuality, though there is that. A couple of her books now have dealt with abortion in settings in which it was both illegal and dangerous, with surrogate families in times when the family was the basic unit of society, and with experiences whose danger, now dissipated in modern society, was once understood and inherent: insanity, for example, or pornography. In many ways the war, in which women were required to step into roles vacated by fighting men, seems tailor-made for this author, and it’s true that the war provides opportunities for most of the female characters that they mightn’t have had otherwise, while generating primarily fear and uncertainty for its one male lead. I’d like to see her revisit World War Two in future novels, because I feel like there’s still meat to be sucked off the bone. A good and entertaining, though not great, read.