Sting in the Tale

Here are reviews of three of the best books I've reviewed recently.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, published in hardback by Virago 

Reading The Night Watch was like listening to tales my grandmother used to tell of life during World War II. They were exciting, a little frightening but always fun. On winter evenings, as dark as a blackout, my sister and I sat in front of the open fire where crumpets on oversized forks toasted to a crisp. We hung on her every word, encouraging her to dig deeper and deeper into her memories. But no matter how long or intricate the story, back came the childish chime of "More, more. Again, again." The Night Watch is just such a tale.

Waters, best selling author of Victorian dramas, Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, sets her latest book during the 1940s, beginning in the shabby, tired England of 1947, moving to 1944 and ending where the protagonist's stories begin, during the Blitz of 1941. It is the story of four Londoners, a young man and three women. Each holds a secret and their lives interweave and intersect during the course of the narrative.

Clever, much loved Helen works with pretty, glamorous Viv in a West End dating agency. Helen's lover is successful crime novelist Julia Standing. Viv is embroiled in a long term affair with prematurely aged, married Reggie, with his thinning hair and "folds in the skin in front of his ears". Viv's brother Duncan lives with a strange 'uncle', Mr Mundy, an ailing man considerably older than Duncan. And then there is posh Kay. Kay was a heroine in wartime – she worked the night shift as an ambulance driver when Hitler's bombs rained down on the blacked out city. In peacetime she is a freak, '"Don't you know the war's over?" … but she had heard this sort of thing a thousand times and it was hard to smile.' In mannish clothes and with cropped hair she wanders the streets of the capital to fill the void in her life.

The Night Watch has been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction and is a very fine book indeed. It is very different to Waters' previous works – in setting, style (realism) and voice (third as opposed to first person). In my opinion, it is Waters' best to date. She is a classy storyteller and I did not want this magnificent, intimate novel to end. Those childish bleatings bubbled forth after many years, "More, more. Again, again." The Night Watch deserves a second reading and may even benefit from it. The language is exquisite and there were many passages that I read over and over simply to experience the sheer beauty and artistry of Waters' words again. Her descriptions of London under attack are riveting, "Two seconds later, the explosion came – fantastically loud, not terribly close, perhaps even as far away as Liverpool Street or Moorgate; but close enough for them to feel the shock of it, the freakish beating against them of a gust of airless wind."

Waters is brutal in her depiction of the devastation and bloodiness caused by the air raids. The loneliness and frustration of imprisoned men is transparent, despite the bravado and her tender, truthful portrayal of love emerging and subsequently breaking down is sexy and heart wrenching.

Characters are well observed and drawn with the finest of brushes. The dialogue is worth a special mention. Helen, Viv, Julia, Kay, Fraser et al sound like real people, and people of the era, not characters dragged off the set of Brief Encounter, or worse, dreaded 'Mockneys'. Period detail is evoked using all the senses: the feel of a contraband pair of satin pyjamas bought as a gift in 1944 against a lover's skin, the smell of face and talcum powder, red, red lipstick, the rare taste of a 'real' cigarette. All the characters smoke, speaking volumes about the time and their lives. Tea at Mr Mundy's consists of 'tomato sandwiches', 'lettuce-hearts and cream crackers'.

The atmospheric first section moves along in slow but steady third gear but once Waters hits the accelerator your stomach hits the floor. The book takes off in the second section, during the Blitz of 1944 and it's an emotional ride. Only one thing disappointed and that was the crime for which one of the characters is imprisoned. It seems slight, almost a non-crime but maybe this is Waters making a point.

By beginning with the end Waters makes a compelling mystery of what could have been a good straight forward story of war and its effects on individual lives. The characters are jaded by their experiences and the trauma of war, yet we do not know what it is that has made them this way. This innovation illustrates perfectly how the past informs our present and to understand one you must understand the other. It also adds poignancy to many scenes. The outwardly calm Helen is beset by eruptions of jealously as cataclysmic as the bombings, "She might be with Ursula Waring, said a gnomish voice, from a dark, grubby corner of Helen's mind;" – we only understand why much later. Viv and Reggie's relationship is stale and well past its sell by date. By the book's close we know how they fell in love ('teeth first' says Viv of Reggie) and have witnessed their earlier, passionate encounters and Reggie's promises of how different life will be for them after the war. We are also privy to an event so shocking and brilliantly conveyed that it is often difficult to read.

Part of Waters' mission is to write lesbians back into history – lesbian herstory if you like. As one would expect, some of the characters in The Night Watch are gay but the scope and range of the book is much greater than gay women's stories during the war. This book covers universal themes and to pigeon hole it as a 'woman's book' or worse, a 'gay woman's book' would be a grave mistake. Waters hits the spot with the stealth of a V-1 bomb exploding in a London street. The after-effects of her work, like the V-1, will be felt for generations. I am only sad that my grandmother isn't alive to read this book herself.

Ghosts and Their Uses by Katherine May, published by Urban Fox Press

Stories of the supernatural have captured the imagination of millions across the globe for centuries. Despite advanced technologies and scientific development we do not live in an entirely rational age. Ghost stories are as potent today as they ever were. And for good reason. Spirits, phantoms and the after-life speak to a deep rooted human need, the desire to believe in an existence after our life on earth. Our bodies may crumble and die but our souls live on and our being can even affect the destiny of those we have left behind. But as writer Katherine May illustrates in her first collection of short stories, Ghosts and Their Uses, we are haunted by all sort of spectres, not just those that fall within the classic horror genre.

The central theme of the collection is the way in which we are haunted in our everyday lives. The shadow side of our being. The narrator in the moving Skating, a simple middle-aged woman trapped at home caring for her aged and infirm mother, is tormented by the memory of the father who deserted her whilst she was still in her mother's womb. In the spellbinding The Witch-Taken a married man's shadow side emerges during an extended period of insomnia. He embarks upon a night time affair with a stranger. There is a dream-like quality to the tale and it is an extremely powerful portrayal of how sleep deprivation alters the lens through which we view the world. As do the dead hours, those magical, spiritual hours between midnight and 3am.

There are more conventional stories of ghouls and phantoms in the book. Prize winning Whistling up the Wind tells of a woman's premonition of her husband's drowning at sea and the extraordinary Heavy Water imparts Natalie's story, a twin who makes contact with the sibling, Cara, who died so that she could live. It is an imaginative and fresh take on the legendary interdependence between identical twins, and beautifully written.

May's language is atmospheric and intimate, "Listen. Can we share a secret?" She is equally at home telling tales in the first and third person, although she confesses to finding it difficult to not write in the first person during a conversation I had with her recently. The setting of her stories range from ancient Greece to modern day Rochester. She evokes magic in worlds that are firmly planted in our everyday experiences. With the skill of a conjurer she will make you believe that women can transform into birds.  May is a talented new voice and her work deserves attention. And independent presses need our support if they are to survive in the current publishing climate. If you'd like a taster of May's work before you buy, read her interpretation of the classic Greek myth, Tereus, published on http://www.hagsharlotsheroines.com/. And then go out and buy her book. New writers need an audience more than anything.

The Good Women of China by Xinran, published in paperback by Vintage

Reading Xinran's first book was a powerful reminder that I have won the lottery of life simply by having the good fortune to have been born in the West in the late 20th century. It was a humbling experience. The Good Women of China is a profoundly disturbing and shocking book. But it is also a book bursting with spirit, resourcefulness and hope for the future-for China's men, as well as her remarkable women.

If your knowledge of China is pretty much limited to facts gleaned from books like Wild Swans or Life and Death in Shanghai (both fabulous, but told from one or two families' perspective only), then I urge you to read this book. For eight years Xinran presented a ground-breaking radio programme in China in which she invited women to phone in and talk about anything that interested or concerned them. The response to this call to speak out was astonishing and Words on the Night Breeze became famous throughout this vast nation for its unflinching portrayal of what it meant to be a woman in modern China. The women's tales were so compelling that Xinran set about collecting and, later, recording them as testimony to their lives. One could argue that it became an obsession.

It is not easy to grasp just how far China has come in the past century, let alone the human cost of such rapid, enforced development, especially for women. In the 1920s European and American women experimented with short hair and shorter hemlines. High-born Chinese women still had their feet bound. In the 1960s and 70s London was swinging and diverse youth cultures exploded on the arts and music scene. China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution; a movement so ugly that appropriate words to describe it and its devastating impact are hard to find, at least for this reviewer.

Through a handful of women's stories Xinran has lifted the veil on Chinese women's lives, excavating their innermost thoughts and experiences, revealing hitherto 'hidden voices', the subtitle of the collection. Lives that were once shrouded in mystery are exposed; raw, often painful, sometime bitter, but always riveting. All 15 tales are extraordinary, all the more so because they are true. The women are old, very young and everything in between; privileged and poor, they have all experienced disaster – both natural and unnatural – and one can only hope that they found the telling of their stories cathartic.

A colleague of Xinran's at the radio station urged her to write down the tales she had gathered to avoid her heart being 'filled up and broken by them'. It must have been gruelling to dig deep into her memory and notes to recreate the stories. But Xinran is a journalist and her training and professionalism has stood her in good stead. She retells the tales with skill, care and empathy, and without a trace of sentimentality. Her reportage style is easy to read and digest; where required she is objective and at all times she retains the drama and suspense in these incredible stories. We feel the unbearable anguish of the mother forced to watch her teenager daughter die slowly before her eyes, crushed and trapped by the debris of their former home following the cataclysmic earthquake in Tangshan in 1976 when 300,000 people lost their lives;the poignant story of the girl abused and raped by her father who keeps a fly as a pet, the brush of its 'tiny hands' on her arm the only tenderness she has experienced in her young life; the woman married by the Party to an emotionally retarded, cruel man; and the stoicism of the women of Shouting Hill, eking out an existence in a desolate, backward region of the country, are all brought vividly to life.

When Xinran came to Britain in 1997 what had been a dangerous idea in China could finally become reality. She felt that the West's understanding of China and her women was limited and that a collection of the stories would go some way to building a bridge of understanding and compassion. The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices does this exceptionally well and some of the women's tales will stay with me forever.