Kate's Reviews > The Night Watch
The Night Watch
by
by

I struggled with my rating on this one. It seems sad to give only 1 star to what feels like an author's greatest effort to date. And I did end up liking one of the characters a little.
Oh well.
Luckily, this book improved after the first 250 dreadful pages. But isn't that a long time to wait for improvement? See my earlier comment for the defects of the book's Part One (takes place in 1947). Part two, set three years earlier, is certainly less boring, but only because the war was still on, not because the plot or characters became more interesting.
I continued to get the impression that the characters didn't inhabit their environment so much as they were transported there against their will. For all her mentions of ration books, warning sirens, etc., Waters utterly fails to make 1944 London come alive. Furthermore, the prose is not strong. The only bold images were things that need no embellishment to be vivid - bombs, abortion, hemorrhage.
While more readable than Part One, Part Two still fell short of interesting, and Part Three, set in 1941 and only about 30 pages long, was sloppy and predictable.
Oh well.
Luckily, this book improved after the first 250 dreadful pages. But isn't that a long time to wait for improvement? See my earlier comment for the defects of the book's Part One (takes place in 1947). Part two, set three years earlier, is certainly less boring, but only because the war was still on, not because the plot or characters became more interesting.
I continued to get the impression that the characters didn't inhabit their environment so much as they were transported there against their will. For all her mentions of ration books, warning sirens, etc., Waters utterly fails to make 1944 London come alive. Furthermore, the prose is not strong. The only bold images were things that need no embellishment to be vivid - bombs, abortion, hemorrhage.
While more readable than Part One, Part Two still fell short of interesting, and Part Three, set in 1941 and only about 30 pages long, was sloppy and predictable.
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Reading Progress
March 19, 2007
– Shelved
March 23, 2007
– Shelved as:
fiction
March 23, 2007
– Shelved as:
own
Started Reading
April 1, 2007
–
Finished Reading
May 7, 2007
– Shelved as:
post-2000
May 27, 2019
– Shelved as:
historical-fic
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It was the same for me -- I plowed through the Little Stranger (and adored it...It really scared me) and went right to the Night Watch. Did you end up finishing it? I actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was a fairly exciting, dramatic historical epic with some good gruesome violence and a little bit of sex thrown in to spice it up.







That all said, I will post a fairer review when/if I finish, by which time I hope at least that the characters' sad, sad sadness will have become moving or meaningful.