'Why does it have to be heaven and hell? Why are those the only options?' ... Marcus Sedgwick Photograph: unknown
A gruesome secret hidden in an abandoned manor house, an intense friendship between two teenage girls, a village of crumbling graveyards and deserted churches, grisly experiments investigating the afterlife ... Marcus Sedgwick isn't understating things when he says with a grin that his latest novel White Crow - shortlisted for the 2010 Guardian children's fiction prize - is "not a bunch of laughs".
What it is, however, is a compelling, creepy and thought-provoking read – a modern gothic that explores religion, death, individual conscience and loyalty without pulling its punches.
Sedgwick, author of 16 books for children and teens, says that a sense of place tends to come before anything else in his stories - and White Crow has a particularly powerful setting. The action takes place during a stiflingly hot summer in the village of Winterfold, which is closely based on the sea-swallowed town of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast. "One of the main things you need for a gothic novel is a suitable location," Sedgwick says. "A place that's falling into the sea seemed perfect." Rebecca has been dragged away from her friends and boyfriend in London to stay in a claustrophobic cottage with her widowed father (who is running from his own problems). She and local girl Ferelith strike up an unlikely and disturbing friendship. While Rebecca is a fairly average teenage girl, struggling with relationships of all kinds, Ferelith is very possibly mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Dark, independent and desperately intelligent, she is a powerfully magnetic character, attracting and repelling Rebecca in equal measure.
The two female narrators are joined by an unnamed rector from the 17th century whom we learn about through the pages of his diaries. It's a gripping read: across the pages, his sanity slowly unravels and he struggles with his faith, his all too earthly desires, and a terrible secret that Sedgwick says is "possibly the most gruesome thing I've ever put in a book".
Questions of belief are central throughout the story. The title is taken from a quote by the American psychologist and philosopher William James - "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white" – and Sedgwick uses it to delve into the possibility that if we can uncover just one provable example from the 'other side', all our beliefs must be thrown into question. We're reminded that "most of the people in the world still believe in God" – what if they're right? It's a question that Sedgwick leaves open, to the frustration of some early blog-reviewers of the book. Sedgwick remains unrepentant.
"I'm not putting any message across at all, I'm just asking you to think about it – which is why the last two pages of the book leave you with contrasting messages from the rector and from Ferelith," he says. "I'm not going to write a book and say that God exists or God doesn't exist. That would be really stupid." While leaving the question open for his readers, however, his own views on the matter are clearer. "For me, the only logical way to be is an agnostic, but if you really push me, I think I'd say no, I don't believe in this."
Sedgwick is no stranger to controversial subjects. His last novel, Revolver, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie prize, tackled the moral dilemmas of gun use. However, he says, that's what makes writing teenage fiction so exciting: you can do almost anything, unconstrained by the obsessions with style and genre that plague adult fiction.
"I remember that feeling of sitting down and thinking: there's a whole world plus several universes all there to be explored and to make a story from," he says. "Then I started writing. Over the years I've got this reputation for writing slightly dark things, but I'm a firm believer that it's not what you do but how you do it, every time. There is almost nothing you can't tackle in a teenage novel, it's just how you do it. That to me is the important thing."
If anyone should know about the state of teenage fiction it's Sedgwick: he's spent most of his working life on the scene. After a degree in politics at Bath University he "drifted around, did some TEFL teaching and got a job in a bookshop". The bookshop happened to be the children's branch of Heffers bookshop in Cambridge: "I suddenly thought: these books are amazing, really exciting. All of my day jobs from then on were in children's publishing."
Despite his 10 years of writing children's and young adult books, not to mention the critical acclaim and award shortlistings, Sedgwick still displays an appealing nervousness about his work. He is author-in-residence at Bath University, leading workshops and mentoring creative writing students, but says that he would never have dared to do a course like that himself; any kind of criticism in the early days would have put him off carrying on. He explains that he still gets "incredibly nervous" when showing a new manuscript to his editor. When he first started writing, because he was already working in children's book marketing, he also decided to send his first work in under a pseudonym because he "really wanted to know that it wasn't about anyone I knew or any connections, I wanted to know that my writing was good enough because, I thought, how otherwise can you take yourself seriously?"
Luckily, Sedgwick doesn't take himself too seriously, or he wouldn't be such good company. Nonetheless, the issue of self-belief is one that seems to resonate with him. "When I go into schools these days the one thing I want to do is make kids think you could do a job like this – become a rock star or a writer or a dancer or a poet or a painter – because I felt that no one ever gave me the belief that you could do those things. In fact a lot of people try to put you off and say 'oh you can't be a writer, no one makes money writing'. I remember someone explicitly saying that to my brother and that made me think again."
Sedgwick's own childhood was filled with books, courtesy of his father. Sedgwick describes him fondly (he died when Sedgwick was 20), and he sounds almost like a character from a book in his own right. Born in 1916, he had a very poor upbringing in Lancashire, effectively growing up an orphan as his mother was an alcoholic. Entirely self-educated, he became a conscientious objector in the second world war and then, in the 1950s, the warden of the Friend's Meeting House in Brighton where he would invite famous thinkers of the time to come and speak.
"We were taught to treat books with reverence," Sedgwick explains. "You would never put a book on the floor, you'd never break its spine, you'd never write in a book. Dad would always give us a book every birthday and Christmas and it was almost symbolic – you must have a book, it's an important thing."
There were several Bibles around the house (Sedgwick used his father's battered old leather one as the model for the Bible that features in Revolver), but also masses of material about William Blake, including a precious facsimile copy of Jerusalem in a box file with "Blake Jerusalem" written down the side. "I thought William Blake was God," Sedgwick laughs. "I thought that was God's name until I was about nine. There was a lot of religious imagery seeping off these shelves ... "
Some of it has undoubtedly seeped into White Crow, but it is also a very religious book in the more subtle sense that, despite the element of gothic melodrama, it also quietly deals with the complexities of belief. "Society tends to polarise things and it's an unhelpful way to think about life. Life is about all the greys between the black and the white," says Sedgwick. "It's one of the things that's always struck me about heaven: if you believe in God and believe in heaven then you must believe in the opposite, the whole yin and yang thing of seeing everything in opposites. Why does it have to be heaven and hell? Why are those the only options? Why aren't there other possibilities?"
In White Crow Sedgwick posits the black and the white, the angel and the devil, the heaven and the hell – and then plays deftly in the space in between.
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