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Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar: On the night shift
Wolf Moon Author : Arifa Akbar ISBN-13 : 978-1399712859 Publisher : Sceptre Guideline Price : £16.99 Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar is a book I wanted to like. Its central question—'What does it mean to be a woman in the night?'— serves as a loose thread binding together memoir, cultural criticism and feminist theory. Akbar's experiences of menopausal insomnia lead into analyses of Louise Bourgeois's night drawings and Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis. Visits to her father's care home are interwoven with eerie Pakistani folktales he once told her. She interviews night-shift workers, dancers in Lahore and security guards. She drifts through galleries, goes clubbing and attends late-night films. There's a perceptive reading of Henri Fuseli's The Nightmare, as well as some evocative descriptions of David Lynch scenes. The cultural references are obvious and a little self-consciously tasteful, but they are handled deftly. This is, unmistakably, a serious and intelligent book. Still, the cumulative effect is deadening. READ MORE The problem isn't the material, which is often fascinating, but Akbar's compulsive need to filter it through the dull strainer of introspective autotheory. Entire pages are padded with limp self-reflection—'I think back to' 'I felt' 'I wondered'—until the prose begins to sag under the weight of its own inwardness. The analytical intensity is often laughably disproportionate to the life being examined: 'I put a notebook beside my bed. I open it up the next morning. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more.' There's also a wearying performance of liberal empathy. When she encounters sex workers dancing in Amsterdam's red-light district, she rushes to ally herself with them, as though fending off imagined accusations. 'I feel horrified,' she declares at a Jack the Ripper tour. 'I was in awe of her fortitude,' she writes of a security guard at her theatre, then asks, 'How did Maria remain invisible to me?' I am naturally distrustful of anyone so easily scandalised. Again and again, moments that might have thrummed with tension are robbed of all charge. We don't just hear that she went to Berghain; we're told what Berghain is, then led through one of the tamest nights in club history. Not her fault, but it's hard to be invested in such a safe and orderly life. A book about night, yes, but drained of its Dionysian wildness.
Times
24-07-2025
- Health
- Times
Up all night with ravers, nuns and shiftworkers
Arifa Akbar is scared of the dark. Her British-Pakistani parents told her horrifying tales of creatures that appeared at night, stories 'of djinns capable of immense violence, of daayans with feet on backwards, disembowelling their victims with their bare hands'. She sleeps with a curtain open to let the light of the street lamps stream through the window and travels with a plug-in nightlight. As the Guardian's chief theatre critic Akbar often has to work late into the night. In Wolf Moon, her lyrical examination of the world between dusk and dawn, she acknowledges the ridiculousness of her night-time anxieties. 'But if there really is nothing to fear, why do I feel so viscerally afraid as the dark levitates towards me, everything and nothing thrumming inside it?' The book is part reporting, part memoir. Akbar writes about her father, who was a security guard, first on the railways and then at the Courtauld gallery in London, working night shifts in both jobs. Akbar observed how his work seemed to change him, 'his skin growing sallower by the day as if he were jaundiced, his thinking confused. He was always on the brink of an unarticulated panic.' He now lives in a care home and has dementia, a health risk linked to nocturnal working. At night he can be distressed — a phenomenon called sundowning when those with dementia begin to hallucinate as the day darkens. 'There are times when he holds on to my hand tightly as if he fears being sucked under by quicksand, and tells me the sky is spinning.' There are about nine million night shift workers in Britain. As well as causing dementia, working at night can cause cardiovascular disease, obesity and depression. The work is also more likely to be low-paid and insecure. Akbar speaks to some of these late-night workers. At a care home in Hertfordshire the carers describe how after their night shift they take their children to school, then pick them up later with barely time to sleep during the day. At New Spitalfields Market in Leyton, east London, she watches hundreds of HGVs queue at midnight to unload fruit and vegetables — 'a lush, vegetative oasis within the city'. She spends the night at the Convent of Poor Clares in Ellesmere, Shropshire, rising with the nuns at midnight to sing matins and again for lauds at 6:30am. • 12 exceptional memoirs from the past 30 years to read next However, some people come alive at night. Akbar goes to Berghain, an LGBT nightclub in Berlin, and dances with a Brazilian trans woman who has been attending for 13 years and an Austrian postman who often stays in the club from Saturday through to Monday. Akbar feels transfigured in the club's darkness. 'I am no longer a responsible homeowner, journalist and carer of elderly parents,' she writes. 'I am no more or less than my silver-black dress and gold eyelashes.' She meets the poet and playwright Debris Stevenson who has been a raver for decades. 'You're less self-conscious in the dark, more embodied and there's a wildness to dancing outside,' Stevenson says. Yet at raves she has been catcalled and filmed without permission and has had to intervene in dangerous situations. She says the sight of men forcing kisses on unconscious women is commonplace. In Lahore, where Akbar spent some of her childhood, she watches a late-night comedy show. After the performance some of the female dancers sell sex to the audience members. An elderly sex worker describes how the work has become more dangerous as stricter laws force them to travel to meet clients in unknown locations. While djinns and daayans may be imagined, the threat of violence at night is real. Sarah Everard's twilight abduction, rape and murder sparked a wave of protests about the risk of walking the streets at night as a woman. But it was hardly a new danger. Akbar attends one of the popular Jack the Ripper tours that trace the murder spots of east London. I went on one of these tours once and a man in my group commented on which of the murdered women was the most attractive. These threats aren't just abstract to Akbar. Her sister Fauzia, whose death was the subject of her first book, Consumed, struggled as a teenager with compulsive eating. She would bribe Akbar and her brother to go to a supermarket at night to buy her food. In her twenties she fell into a depression and became homeless. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List At her hungriest Fauzia would go through bins on the streets. After her death by undiagnosed tuberculosis Akbar's family agonised over how she had contracted the disease. They wondered if it happened in this dark and desperate time of her life. What might otherwise feel like a random collection of vignettes is threaded together by Akbar's grief for her sister and her anxiety for her father. Wolf Moon is a celebration of the exuberance of night-time and a moving portrait of the dangers of the dark. Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into the Night by Arifa Akbar (Sceptre £16.99 pp256). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar review
Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a 'difficult' night. That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter's book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives. And yet if there is something unheimlich about turning night into day, there is also significant potential for liberation and metamorphosis. Akbar's narrative itself shifts from chronicling the negative impacts of sleep deprivation to the freedom of choosing to stay awake, as she recalls youthful late-night cinema trips with her sister Fauzia, whose life and premature death from undiagnosed tuberculosis Akbar described in her first book, Consumed, and the aimless night bus trips her brother, Tariq, took with his friends. They were each looking for escape, not merely from a home life that sometimes felt oppressive and unstable, but for anonymity, a chance to pass unnoticed amid crowds of strangers. That relationship with the night, and with the faintly transgressive sense of slipping into another realm, changes with context. The relaxed enjoyment that many women experienced as they took to the relatively unpeopled but more closely monitored open spaces of London during lockdown, for example, was radically changed when Sarah Everard was abducted by a serving police officer on her lockdown walk home, and subsequently raped and killed; it is a terrible reminder that the real threat is not the ghouls or monsters of folklore, or the ghost of Jack the Ripper invoked on popular tours of Whitechapel, but 'the very real hazard of murderously angry men'. Akbar also introduces us to the all-night light of Svalbard, and the exuberant singers, dancers and actors of Lahore's after-hours theatre scene. But it is the book's more abstract meditations that really capture the imagination. It is unsurprising that her love of sitting in an enclosed space watching players enact a drama is linked to the fantastical stories of djinns and dayaans that her parents used to tell. The night-time rambles that she still feels impelled to undertake mirror her father's childhood walks around Shimla, excursions in which not only nostalgia but the trauma of emigration are embedded. The spectres that haunt our dreams and hypnagogic states are unreal, but they are also vivid manifestations of what troubles us, Akbar concludes. Acknowledging that is not a cure for the vulnerability that night ushers in, but it is a step towards allowing a little light into the darkness. This imaginative and empathetic book will probably not guide you to better sleep, but it will be a fine companion for the wakeful hours. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into Night by Arifa Akbar is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar review
Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a 'difficult' night. That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter's book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives. And yet if there is something unheimlich about turning night into day, there is also significant potential for liberation and metamorphosis. Akbar's narrative itself shifts from chronicling the negative impacts of sleep deprivation to the freedom of choosing to stay awake, as she recalls youthful late-night cinema trips with her sister Fauzia, whose life and premature death from undiagnosed tuberculosis Akbar described in her first book, Consumed, and the aimless night bus trips her brother, Tariq, took with his friends. They were each looking for escape, not merely from a home life that sometimes felt oppressive and unstable, but for anonymity, a chance to pass unnoticed amid crowds of strangers. That relationship with the night, and with the faintly transgressive sense of slipping into another realm, changes with context. The relaxed enjoyment that many women experienced as they took to the relatively unpeopled but more closely monitored open spaces of London during lockdown, for example, was radically changed when Sarah Everard was abducted by a serving police officer on her lockdown walk home, and subsequently raped and killed; it is a terrible reminder that the real threat is not the ghouls or monsters of folklore, or the ghost of Jack the Ripper invoked on popular tours of Whitechapel, but 'the very real hazard of murderously angry men'. Akbar also introduces us to the all-night light of Svalbard, and the exuberant singers, dancers and actors of Lahore's after-hours theatre scene. But it is the book's more abstract meditations that really capture the imagination. It is unsurprising that her love of sitting in an enclosed space watching players enact a drama is linked to the fantastical stories of djinns and dayaans that her parents used to tell. The night-time rambles that she still feels impelled to undertake mirror her father's childhood walks around Shimla, excursions in which not only nostalgia but the trauma of emigration are embedded. The spectres that haunt our dreams and hypnagogic states are unreal, but they are also vivid manifestations of what troubles us, Akbar concludes. Acknowledging that is not a cure for the vulnerability that night ushers in, but it is a step towards allowing a little light into the darkness. This imaginative and empathetic book will probably not guide you to better sleep, but it will be a fine companion for the wakeful hours. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into Night by Arifa Akbar is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
