Add to researchMarcus Sedgwick

Floodland (2000), Marcus Sedgwick’s award winning debut novel, imagines environmental disaster from a child’s perspective.

It is a book reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) with just a hint of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983). The future Britain that Sedgwick fictionalises in Floodland is virtually submerged, a former island flooded to form a series of isolated islands inhabited by gangs that have gone, or are going, native. It will come as no surprise to hear that the novel is working with current world events: global warming, the melting of the polar ice caps, rising sea levels. However, the potentially predictable topicality of the theme is rescued by the vitality and originality of the novel’s plot, which centres on the predicament of a young girl, Zoe, after she has become separated from her family during the floods:

The telegraphic half sentences with which the book begins sets the breathless pace for the rest of the text, which is particularly well pitched to grip the teenage reader.

The narrative of Sedgwick’s next novel, Witch Hill (2001), carries some striking parallels with the first book, and like Floodland is also propelled by a disaster (this time a fire, and a family tragedy). Witch Hill thrusts the young protagonist, Jamie, into an unfamiliar world without parents and for the young protagonists of both these books, events beyond their control lead to the removal of conventional authority figures, a fact the children find both threatening and liberating. In Sedgwick’s most recent novel, Revolver (2009) the death of a father in a remote and inhospitable landscape leaves the son having to work out whether or not to use his dad’s gun when a stranger shows up at their cabin. This plot device, in which a child is thrust into a world where conventional power structures are temporarily suspended, reveals Sedgwick as a self-conscious craftsman, drawing upon some of the classic elements of the traditional children’s tale. If the icy, isolated landscape of Revolver has something of the otherworldly about it, Mary Hoffman has noted that some its central concerns are much closer to home:

While almost all Sedgwick’s work to date reveals a concern with 20th-century history (from the preoccupation with the first world war in Cowards (2003) and The Foreshadowing (2005), to the creative re-imagining of the Russian Revolution in Blood Red, Snow White, 2007), or gestures to the future (Floodlands), the magical and mythical elements that suffuse his writing are in certain respects closer to the ‘timeless’ fable. Folk narratives and fairy tales are rarely far away in Sedgwick’s story telling, which draws, for instance, upon Greek myths and Norse legends, in order to re-tell the eternal struggle between good and evil - see, for example, Dark Horse (2002) and The Book of Dead Days (2003).

Like the story-telling traditions upon which he draws, there is a dark side to much of Sedgwick’s fiction which deals unflinchingly with sensitive subjects such as death and violence. The gothic themes that can be traced through many of the novels are given lighter treatment in his series of books for younger children (seven year olds and above): the Raven Mysteries. This series of six books, which playfully nods to the American master of gothic fiction, Edgar Allen Poe, are set in Castle Otherland. Inhabited by characters like Lord Valevine (inventor of the square wheel) and Solstice (an award-winning teen goth with black hair and bulbous eyes), the beautifully illustrated world Sedgwick has created carries more than a hint of the 1960s television sitcom, The Munsters.

Gothic mystery presents a more eerie shroud in Sedgwick’s latest thriller, White Crow (2010). Set in the fictitious village of Winterfold, the narrative inhabits an imagined space reminiscent of Floodland, a coastal setting where cliffs are crumbling into the stormy sea, and land is reclaimed by water. The modern day deluge that forms the backdrop to this tale is told from the perspective of three narrators: Ferelith, Rebecca and Dr Barrieux, forging an unholy tale that as Philip Ardagh notes compensates for any loss of narrative coherence through the vitality of its ideas:

Within the space of a decade Sedgwick’s 11 novels have contributed much to the texture of recent children’s literature, and are in and of themselves testament to what Ardagh suggests is a soaring imagination.

Dr James Procter, 2010