posted on 12 Nov 2016

The Foreshadowing by Marcus Sedgwick

It’s 1915, Europe is just descending into war and 17 year old Alexandra (Sasha) Fox is living a comfortable middle class life at home with her patriarchal father, submissive mother and two brothers, the manly Edgar and the sensitive Thomas. But, we discover very early in Marcus Sedgwick’s novel, Sasha is anything but an ordinary Edwardian teenager. Not only does she chaff to be allowed to be more than just a passive daughter, she also has visions of the future and, disturbingly, she can foretell death.

Her first vision of a death foretold comes when she is just five and she is subsequently haunted by dreams of death and the vision of a raven that looms over her in her sleep. Sasha’s father is a hospital doctor of some repute and as the initial war injuries start to mount he succumbs, despite his initial hostility, to Sasha’s desire to become a voluntary nurse. But her ability to work in the hospital is undermined by her visions of the impending death of some of the soldiers she comes into contact with. She has a gift – or maybe more accurately – a curse and the men she touches sense her strange power.

Sasha comes to see herself as a modern day Cassandra – doomed to see the future but also to never be believed. Her worst fears are realised when she foresees the death of Edgar – a blow that shatters the family. She is comforted in part by the fact that her favourite brother Thomas has refused to join up and is training instead to be a doctor.

However when Thomas shocks the family and joins the infantry in France Sasha is devastated to have a vision of his death – she knows he will be shot and die in France. Unable to bear the prospect of losing her favourite brother she steals the identity of a nurse and heads off to France to find him and alter his future.

The rest of the story is a remarkable tale of how she makes her way across war-torn France and the dreadful carnage of the fighting she witnesses in search of Thomas. She is helped in her task by a soldier, a dispatch rider, known as Hoodoo Jack who is shunned by his mates because he too claims to be able to foretell their deaths. The denouement is based on a minor but very effective plot twist – and you would curse me if I gave it away here.

This is the first novel I’ve read by Marcus Sedgwick although I am aware of how popular he is and what a dedicated readership he has. From the evidence of this book I can see why he would be a favourite of a young adult audience – he certainly doesn’t patronise or write down to his readers and his characters although not subtly drawn are three dimensional and compelling. It’s an unusual decision to write a book about the horrors of The Somme and the war in France on a wider front as seen from the exclusive point of view of a young woman but it’s also a device that works very well – although you will have to suspend your disbelief on occasions.

The book is a real page-turner but it may be twenty or thirty pages too long I think. The pace of the story really does start to sag just after half way and some of the detail of Sasha’s nursing life does have a slightly repetitive feel. However, I think the fact that Sedgwick slightly takes his foot off the gas at this point is more than compensated for by the excellent last thirty or forty pages when the action becomes breathless and the conclusion builds in a way you probably wouldn’t anticipate.

It hadn’t really occurred to me that I was reading a book about the inhumanity of war on Armistice Day weekend but the rather sombre messages in the book turned out to be an entirely appropriate act of remembrance.

 

Terry Potter

November 2016