Wolf Moon: women’s journeys through the night

The night that Arifa Akbar explores is not the domain of nocturnal creatures. Despite the book’s title, there are no wolves. There is no moon either – nothing much at all of the natural night. Rather, it explores the night we have so recently created, mostly in cities, lit and populated but still freighted with ancient fears.

That said, the avowedly urban author opens her book with a visit to Sark, an island where billionaires arrive by helicopter and everyone assures her she’ll be safe to wander. She’s hoping for starry skies, but night-time country lanes are not for her. (This is a person who carries a plug-in night light in her luggage.) She jumps at imagined shapes, outdoors or in. Soon she is back in London. The trip was not a success, star-wise, but it introduces the theme. If we take dark and night as synonymous, what goes on there nowadays, especially for women?

However much we try to avoid the actual night, metaphorical darkness persists. The book is as much about the author’s family and cultural background as anything else. A father lost in the darkness of dementia, the death of a sister, the shadowed hinterlands that an immigrant family feels obliged to occupy, at least at first. In fact, walking by night may have helped with the adjustment, from Pakistan to England. Akbar took night walks as a teen with a “sense of release from the family fray” (“The circling of the streets in darkness was a way to re-find myself … each step leading me closer to calling myself a Londoner”). She is still a creature of the night; as a theatre critic, many of her days finish late.

But who else populates the night? It is a rich mixture. In our post-industrial country, the number of women working at night is rising. In hospitals and the “care industry”, 80% of employees are female, often working ill-paid night shifts, so they can afford to spend some daylight hours with their children, seeing them off to school before they catch a few hours’ sleep.

Akbar spends the night in her father’s care home, attending 2am staff meetings. Dementia is a disease noted for its “sundown” effect; symptoms often worsen at dusk. “The night at this home is neither quiet nor passive,” she writes. There are residents who believe that night is day, and staff obliged to spend their working days at night. They never get used to nocturnal working, they say, but needs must. Sleeplessness is notoriously bad for our health, but the underpaid have little chance to catch up, no time for renewal.

Along with the care sector and 24/7 hospitals, it is the arts, entertainment and recreation industries that keep people out at night. Akbar speaks to the “invisible” non-glamorous members of this economy, such as the female door staff in theatreland. “I’m here to watch over people like you,” one tells her. Some people have no one to watch over them. Homelessness, for women, can mean nights riding around on buses, or sleeping in disused cars or woods for their own safety. At night they hide themselves so well that even street counts of the homeless miss them, always moving on to avoid violence and  abuse.

But any account of women and the night has to confront that violence and abuse. We’re taken from ghastly Jack the Ripper street tours to Reclaim the Night protests in Leeds, which began after the Peter Sutcliffe murders in the late 1970s. Akbar casts her net wide. We’re taken to a late night floor show in Lahore, to New Spitalfields fruit market in London, where you can buy avocados at 2am. Then, north, to the constant daylight of midsummer Svalbard, to discover what life is like without darkness at all. Women walk at “night” quite safely (polar bears pose the greater danger).

There is much here of the insomniac arts and artists, from Dickens to Van Gogh to 24-hour theatre productions. Most energising is a trip to Berghain, a former power plant in Germany, which houses a nightclub that emerged from the gay and fetish scenes of the 1990s. It is famed, Akbar writes, for its “dark rooms and sexual abandon” as well as its “haughty”entry policy. The door staff here are not guardians; their function is “more akin to ‘casting’” as they decide who can enter. It’s not a matter of “dressing up” but of presenting yourself authentically as yourself.

Akbar is admitted, dressed in “a chainmail dress, along with an assortment of mesh, fishnet, gold and leopard skin”. “I want to make the Styx-like crossing into the underworld,” she writes. This from a woman scared to walk down a country lane. Inside, the music pounding, it is exhilarating, friendly. Akbar dances till daylight creeps in around the blackout blinds. “I see now how people come here not to be released, but to be returned to themselves,” she writes.

All-night clubbing in chainmail. What could be more different than the life of a nun? Akbar also visits a convent in Shropshire, where the nuns are few in number but nevertheless have an “intense, collective presence”. They are as curious about her life as she is about theirs. Unusually, she is in bed by 10.30pm, only to rise at midnight for prayers. It’s hardly a nightclub, but with their alternative, statement-making clothing, embrace of the night for hymns, and abandonment of an ordinary female life, perhaps the two paths are closer than you might imagine.

At its best, Wolf Moon is an energetic exploration of these alternatives. (But not the obvious: for all the women she talks to, none are mothers nursing their young children.) For all those who are obliged to work nocturnal hours, often on zero-hour contracts, there are others for whom night can be delicious. It can be a time of threat but also of truancy, whether that means joining a crowd of strangers or walking the streets alone, enchanted and scared at once.

Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99). Order a copy at observershop.co.uk for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply.