Night Watch

In 1874 a woman and her twelve year old daughter arrive at the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, delivered there by the abusive veteran who has attached himself to their lives. The mother cannot speak. The girl, who calls herself ConaLee, has been keeping them both alive for years and does the talking.

The asylum is not the horror it might be. It is a new institution built on the moral treatment principles of the period, with grounds and work and something approaching kindness, and the novel is unusual in showing an American psychiatric hospital as a refuge rather than a prison.

Around them Phillips reconstructs what the war did. A Union sharpshooter wakes in a field hospital with no memory and no name, and is eventually given work as the asylum's night watchman, which is where the title comes from. A Confederate deserter attaches himself to a household of women in the West Virginia hills and stays for years on terms nobody chose. The strands converge slowly, and the reader assembles the family before the family does, which is a large part of the tension.

The prose is dense and the chronology moves without warning between 1864 and 1874, so this is not a book to read distractedly. Chapter headings carry dates and it is worth reading them. Expect little violence on the page and a great deal of its aftermath, particularly what it did to women left alone in a border state where both armies passed through. Best for readers who liked Cold Mountain or News of the World and want something quieter, stranger and more interior.