During a particularly memorable scene in Night Watch, which is set around the American civil war, a little girl is lowered headfirst into an open grave by her mother in order to pull a rifle off a fresh corpse. That this harrowing exploit ultimately proves pointless – the protection offered by the retrieved weapon is insufficient for the danger they face – is emblematic of the book’s unsparing vision.
This is Jayne Anne Phillips’s sixth novel, and her third, after Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite, to take up the cost of war for combatants and non-combatants alike. She is unusually well placed, then, to probe the civil war, a brutal four-year conflagration that killed more than 700,000 people, devastated the lives of many more and sent aftershocks of violence and division rippling all the way through to the present.
Though it contains numerous vivid characters – including John O’Shea, a disfigured night-watchman who gives the book its title, an Irish healer named Dearbhla and a wild orphan boy called Weed – the novel is largely the story of the little girl, ConaLee, who was lowered into the grave, and of her mother, Eliza, who did the lowering. Set mostly in West Virginia and Virginia during the war and at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum some 10 years afterwards, Night Watch depicts the horrors the two confront in the wake of ConaLee’s father’s enlistment, as the US begins to tear itself apart.
Their trials come at the hands of a sadistic veteran who makes his entry into their lives by perpetrating a terrifyingly detailed assault on Eliza. Insisting grotesquely on being called “Papa”, he returns again and again to tyrannise them. In scenes that both mirror and warp the wartime travails of ConaLee’s actual father, which Phillips describes economically in alternating chapters, mother and daughter are brought low indeed.
When Papa finally tires of them, he enacts an elaborate, Wilkie Collins-style scheme to be rid of them and simultaneously cover his tracks: have them committed. At his instruction, teenage ConaLee becomes a servant known as “Nurse Connolly”, and Eliza, largely mute after years of rape and abuse, plays the role of her employer, a troubled gentlewoman called “Miss Janet”. The two are admitted with little question into the “home for lunatics”.
Phillips’s depiction of a ravaged world in which so many have lost their way or had it stolen from them, both physically and mentally, feels true to the profoundly destabilising nature of her subject. As one woman puts it, understatedly, “My husband came back [from battle] but struggled to be himself.” Voluntarily or involuntarily, the novel’s characters have changed names, or otherwise been distanced from themselves, and the asylum, set in handsome grounds and run according to remarkably forward-thinking principles, proves a haven. As “Nurse Connolly” and “Miss Janet” accustom themselves to days that are suddenly filled with regular meals, long walks pleasant company and salubrious carriage rides, other tales emerge and become intertwined with theirs.
One story belongs to O’Shea, the guardian of the asylum, who came out of the war with an injury-induced amnesia that cuts him off from any knowledge of his past, except that he feels disturbingly comfortable with a rifle in his hands. We relive the brutal battle in which he was wounded through Phillips’s crisp narration: “The line yelled together, plunging down the slope in a bombardment of shell and bullets so heavy and deafening it was as though they’d entered a field on fire.”
O’Shea’s current condition both deepens the mystery that informs the novel and serves as the central node of a matrix of coincidence that in less skilful hands might have detracted rather than enhanced. Phillips pulls it off by leaning into the device rather than away from it: the attentive reader will perceive clues and spot coincidences throughout Night Watch. The result is that when, say, one character’s relationship to another becomes fully clear, it feels like a satisfying confirmation born out of a context of deep connection, rather than a cheap reveal.
Night Watch is tough reading, even excruciating at times, but far from unrelentingly bleak; small notes of grace appear throughout the novel, especially, albeit briefly, at the end. If at one juncture ConaLee remarks grimly “I’d not seen the war except in what it ruined”, she and some of those around her at the asylum are also offered a glimpse of what might, with time and care, be restored. “Much of [the civil war] is encrusted in myth or still unexplored,” the late Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, wrote in 2010. With this excellent novel, Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light.
• Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips is published by Little, Brown (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
