As children, we’re primed by literature to think of the night as a time for adventure as well as rest, but by early middle age, we’ve mostly ringfenced its darkness for sleep (or, for the insomniacs among us, anxieties about sleep’s absence). Author Dan Richards is no exception, and it took a nuit blanche stranded 3,600 metres up a Swiss mountain to reawaken his sense of night-time’s vast and varied potential. Hopelessly lost, he drew comfort from the occasional blips of aircraft in the sky above and from moving lights in the town below: others, too, were out and about, albeit in less of a fix. What could they all be doing?
Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark details his subsequent investigation into “the who and the how of the nocturnal world”. Its pages, immersive and personal, span encounters with night owls of all feathers, from the heroic (Richards hears tales of medalled RNLI bravery on the high seas) to the stoic (shift patterns leave a crane operator at Southampton docks with scant time to himself); and from the intrepid (amateur chiropterologists) to the trapped (he visits but chooses not to quote rough sleepers in Westminster, deeming it too “intrusive”).
Travelling to Le Mans for France’s 24-hour motor race, the writer finds actor Michael Fassbender competing and has a quick chat about night’s calm focus. In Finland, he explores the landscape that inspired Moominland Midwinter, Tove Jansson’s triumphantly crepuscular evocation of a world made unrecognisably eerie by polar night. Darkness sharpens the senses and, even when closer to home, Richards’s observations convey a quality of enhanced reality: the buttery scent of oven-hot croissants fragrant as he joins early rising bakers in Dalston; the sound of a horn immense as he rides beside the driver of a Royal Mail train – “a shuttered ghost” – haring south.
“While many people experience similar days, almost every night is unique,” he declares – a conviction bolstered by the book’s diverse structure as well as the eclectic amble of its scope. A chapter about new mothers, for instance, consists almost entirely of transcripts from conversations and voice notes in which women confide their memories of “peaceful, panicked, protracted and psychedelic nights”.
Shortly after Richards began his research, the Covid pandemic took hold, and it seemed as though one item on his wishlist – visiting a hospital at night – would prove impossible. Then he caught the virus and found himself rushed into intensive care. “All a bit method,” he joked with medical staff from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary some months later, but his description of the week he spent there, fearfully drifting in and out of consciousness, is genuinely nightmarish.
While the episode leaves Richards with night terrors for a spell, it ultimately fortifies his determination to search for the light, even – especially – in darkness. The pages that follow are suffused with feelings of a type that briefly, back in pandemic times, seemed here to stay: kindness, generosity, an appreciation for the virtues of care and service (he acknowledges it’s an old-fashioned concept), enacted while the rest of the world slumbers.
This is not a work that claims to be comprehensive, and if the reader finds themselves wondering why, for instance, there’s no real acknowledgment of how gender plays into our readiness to embrace the night, Richards’s freewheeling approach yields ample charm and intrigue, whether he’s gazing up to find “pipistrelles spinning about our heads like a spout of pencil shavings” or pondering what it’s like to actually be a bat. By the book’s end, night has grown to seem vibrant and companionable, its darkness as much a state of mind as a physical fact.
• Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark by Dan Richards is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
