White Crow by Marcus Sedgwick

We returned from one of our regular trips to the library recently - me with a bagful of poetry – and my daughter with White Crow, a young adult novel with a dark, portentous cover…

As soon as we were through the front door, my daughter disappeared to her room, clutching the book like a prize – and by tea time, she had already read half way through it. By the end of the day, she had finished it, and was wearing that enigmatic expression of a reader just emerged from a journey somewhere inward, challenging and rewarding…

She mentioned an elfin-like girl named Ferelith – and mysteries that had gripped so much, she had been unable to put the book down… But she didn’t want to spoil it for me if I decided to read it too… (I’ve been careful not to include any potential spoilers in the following review, for the same reason…)

In the library, I’d only taken in a general impression of the book’s cover and title. Now, looking at it again, I fully registered who the author was – and recognised Marcus Sedgwick’s name as one that often crops up on children’s book recommendations and shortlists for book awards, including the Carnegie Medal. I checked my bookshelves – and yes, I was right, I have one of his other novels, The Dark Horse, which I bought a while back and still haven’t got round to reading.

Intrigued, I borrowed White Crow from my daughter a few days later – and, like her, found it was one of those gobble-up books that won’t let you go. I’m not quite sure who or what did the devouring – whether I gobbled up the book, or whether it gobbled me. All I know is that I was edgily compelled to turn just one more page, to read just one more chapter – unable to let it go. The book has an uneasy hold on you – circling you first with intrigue, and then moving in ever closer, to enmesh you in a growing sense of troubling darkness.

And as the story progresses, we are moving into very dark and disturbing stuff indeed. At the climax of the novel, Sedgwick heightens the tension to such a degree, my fear for the protagonist became oppressive, almost physical. Mistrust, the sinister and the malign are pitched to an all pervasive sense of dread; an almost unbearable suspense.

Reading this book, I felt increasingly on shifting ground – metaphorically and, in terms of the characters’ location, quite literally. The story is set in the village of Winterfold, based on Dunwich in Suffolk:

‘Once upon a time there was a whole town here, not just a handful of houses. A town with twelve churches and thousands of people, dozens of streets, and a busy harbour.

And then the sea ate it.

Storm by storm, year by year, the cliffs collapsed into the advancing sea, taking the town with it, house by house and street by street…’

We see a landscape where the last remaining church in the village is half eaten away by cliff erosion, its eastern end gaping open to sea, moon and stars; where the graves and bones of the long dead are poised to fall into the sea – and where subterranean secrets of the past are about to be exposed in all their horror.

This is a novel of big themes and big questions. It’s about the inevitability of death and loss – and about human questioning beyond the boundaries of that inevitability. Opposites constantly fray each other’s edges – life and death, sea and land, love and hate, good and evil, trust and mistrust, choice and fate, hope and despair, heaven and hell – angels and devils.

Sixteen year old Rebecca arrives in Winterfold with her father, their relationship also fraying at the edges of love, mistrust and resentment. Her father is a police officer, under suspicion for some kind of dereliction of duty that may have led to the death of a young girl. In Winterfold, they are looking for a retreat from the hell of their situation in London.

Rebecca meets Ferelith, a local girl with an ethereal, other-worldly quality, who is:

‘…strange-looking; there’s something elfin about her. Everything ends in points; her nose, her eyes, her chin, her lips, her fingers, the spikes of her long tresses of black hair…… her teeth, not quite a vampire’s, but not far short.’

Ferelith is a highly intelligent young woman who, having gained her ‘A’ levels at the age of fourteen has taken herself out of school, bored with it limitations. What interest her are big questions. Is there a God? If there is a guiding force in the universe, is it benign? Is the universe just a big cosmic accident? Is there a purpose to life? What are the implications of all the possibilities? She becomes obsessed with the question of life after death, wrapping up her thoughts in stories that surround the old, ruined manor in Winterfold; stories of a man called Dr Barrieux who arrived in Winterfold in the eighteenth century, fresh from the French Revolution, amid rumours that he was conducting sinister experiments into the possibilities of life after death.

An exploration of the philosophy of William James (philosopher and psychologist brother of the novelist Henry James) also runs through the fabric of the novel; Ferelith is very interested in choice and how it determines the future – and bound up in her obsession with questions about the afterlife, is William James’s analogy of the white crow. As Ferelith explains it in the novel:

‘You might say that although you have not seen every crow in the whole world, every crow you have ever seen is black. Therefore the chances are very great that all crows are black. In fact, you have decided that all crows are black. Now of course, if someone could show you a white crow, everything would be overturned in a moment.

But all crows are black.

And in the same way, you conclude that no one lives after death. There is no ‘other side’. There is no white crow.

But, supposing I said I had seen a white crow? Just one. A single white crow.

What then?’

There is a leaden weight of sadness and suffering behind both girls’ histories, and a longing to love underlies their troubled paths. In their developing friendship, there is a moving, tentative reaching out through the ravages of damage, whilst manipulation and detachment , threat, cruelty, power-play and vulnerability become a shifting counter current in that connection between them.

The summer in which the story takes place is unrelentingly hot, dry and parched – but, like everything in the book, the unease between states is held on a knife edge and Winterfold, living up to its name, retains ‘a cold embrace, and like the snows of winter, it does not let you go easily.’

The language is tight, edgy; it makes you jittery and unsure. There are three narrators – an omnipotent narrator, telling the story in third person present tense, an eighteenth century priest telling his story in diary form – and Ferelith, narrating in first person past tense. Like the unstable landscape, the unsettling dance between the narratives adds to the shifting feel of the book – and the reasons for the differing tenses become startlingly exposed by the end of the novel. The very structure of the book fulfils the interplay of its explorations.

All the time, as I raced through the book, I was aware that Marcus Sedgwick was layering the narrative with meaning and significance, with clues and pointers; food for endlessly questioning thought. For instance, each of the chapters narrated by Ferelith is headed by a song title, which I’m sure on further investigation, will throw up some deeper significance. So far, in hindsight, I’ve realised how one is a major clue.

It is a book that deserves a second – slower and closer – reading. Its structure is layered with fraught possibilities, working on many levels simultaneously. The symbolic and apparent, the psychological and physical, the natural and supernatural draw the reader to their tipping points, challenging interpretation. Taking us on subterranean journeys of the human mind, Sedgwick offers up an unsettling exploration of the unanswerable, and leaves our perceptions teetering on that ever present knife edge of doubt and insight.

This is territory suitable for older children and adults. Dark, disturbing and leading into gruesome and horrifying recesses of humanity, it is a troubling read, but one that nags at the edges of the mind and sets a deep questioning to eat away at assumptions and veiled possibilities, exposing them to the light of scrutiny, just as the sea in the book relentlessly uncovers what’s hidden, and the storms force us to look and see.

The Swifts have ‘made it again’

They’re back! Tumbling through the blue sky above our garden…

My first sighting of swifts this year!

At about mid-day today, I was hanging out the washing in a dreamy, basking-in-the-sunshine sort of way - a speckled wood butterfly fluttering close to my feet – when I heard the swifts call. Not that full scream, spread out across the sky like a banner – but a faint, familiar, busy, bubble of sound tossed between them in the air far above.

Instantly, I snapped awake – and jerked my head back to see three, then five altogether, tumbling, turning, glimmering way up in that liquid, clear blue.

I thought I heard swifts overhead last Friday; just the briefest of calls. But it was raining and very overcast, and when I scanned the sky I could see no sign… so, either I’d made a mistake – or they were there, hidden above the low, white curtain of cloud…

But now, I’ve seen them for sure! They’ve definitely returned! And the uplift of that moment is incredible – as it is every year.  All the nature lovers I know start buzzing with it – passing on the mantra: “They’re back!” – a shorthand everyone instantly understands.

Ted Hughes captures that moment, that feeling – and the pure essence of swifts (in description, and in the very movement and rhythm of the words) – to utter perfection:

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialise at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries.
      Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.
                                  They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come –

 - From Swifts by Ted Hughes.

… My much-read copy of the poem lives in this volume, published by Faber and Faber, and wonderfully illustrated by Raymond Briggs; a volume my daughter bought for me one birthday. A perfect book for the generations to share:

Stories in Rocking Horse Attics…

Maundy Thursday in the beautiful city of Bath was a day of shifting spring sunshine and a pouncing April Fool wind. Swathes of daffodils shivered in Victoria Park, lesser celandines were opening their petals beneath stately trees…

Lesser Celandine, Ranunculus ficaria

…and we, via Royal Crescent, The Circus (and no doubt the route of many a Jane Austen stroll) were on our way to The Paragon – and our first ever visit to  Topping & Co. booksellers

As we approached the pale blue shop front, we caught tantalising first glimpses through its windows – warm light, lingering readers, towering walls of books, beautiful wood floors – and then the door was closing behind us, and it was like entering a gentle fold of time, back to the bookshops of my childhood…

All around us, floor to ceiling, there was a vast selection of titles; row upon row of backlist volumes as well as current bestsellers, a discerning variety and breadth of choice wherever you looked. The natural history section was a rare treat in itself – packed full of carefully chosen titles spanning years of the best nature writing, not just the latest releases or TV tie-ins. Here was an ideal roll call of writers – a lovely selection of titles by Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, and all the others you would wish to see represented there. It was wonderful to see the New Nature Writing issue of Granta tucked between them, completing the picture.

For a long while, I browsed in the children’s section and marvelled at the beautiful display of hardback gift books. It was a feast of magic for the eyes. Spines of sumptuous red, green, blue or inky black – gold blocked and cloth-bound volumes, all primed to begin their journeys through the lives of generations of readers to come. Heirlooms waiting for a home…

My eye was particularly drawn to a gorgeous cloth-bound volume, containing Susan Cooper’s complete The Dark is Rising sequence; a gem of an edition which I’ve not seen anywhere else – and, until now, never knew existed. It was so heart warming to see this fitting tribute to how special these books are – a gem for a gem, made to be treasured.

There’s something about storybooks like these, especially when gathered together in such numbers – that speaks of magic libraries in mysterious, Green Knowe houses; volumes waiting to be read in rocking horse attics, or in secret gardens – or on Gyptian ships bound for Svalbard…

My daughter’s eyes were shining as she drank it all in. Everywhere we looked our gaze fell on abundant treasures. Bookshops like Topping’s feel such an organic part of the journey of reading. They intensify the whole sensory and tactile experience, so that even before ‘Once Upon a Time,’ the discovery and anticipation begin.

The only way we’re going to keep these special places, and the experience they offer, is to spend money in them – so, as my daughter had some saved up Christmas money, she was able to make her selection from the ‘magic library.’

She chose this beautiful Everyman’s Library Children’s Classic edition of a well loved favourite, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty:

Her old second hand paperback copy has all but fallen apart after many a bumpy rucksack journey to school – so this will be her treasure-copy, living long on her shelves for repeated readings (I can almost see those imaginary great-grandkids turning these pages in years to come!)

On its first journey home as heirloom-in-waiting, Black Beauty was joined by Cornelia Funke’s Inkspell (my daughter’s other choice from Topping’s shelves)  – plus quite a hoard of other books which, earlier in the day, we’d bought with our stash of chain-store gift tokens left over from Christmas:

I’m looking forward to reading the Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson (I loved the gripping storytelling and Woman in White, gothic feel of Fingersmith. And Kate Atkinson is a firm favourite, always providing a sparkling festival of fiction delights) but I’m sure I’ll be borrowing some of my daughter’s choices too!  

We’ll definitely be back to Topping’s whenever we get the chance. In fact, I can feel the pull to return there already. Our Rocking Horse Attic is just an imaginary one – but that gorgeous edition of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series definitely belongs there, I think…