Marcus Sedgwick
Nicholas Tucker remembers author Marcus Sedgwick through his many novels for young people.
Marcus was a born writer. A man of intriguing opposites, he could be shy one moment, gregarious the next. Multi-talented, sometimes adding his own woodcuts to stories for younger readers, he was also an accomplished amateur musician, playing the drums and the bass guitar in two bands. He ended his days living on his own in Dordogne in search of respite from the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) that plagued him for much of his adult life. From enjoying a daily run of up to three miles he was sometimes reduced to a state where he was barely able to walk or even stand.
But his mind remained as restlessly questing as ever, as evidenced in his over forty novels. Most of them subtly weave intellectual enquiry into a narrative where nothing could be taken for granted. Marcus always said he wrote for himself not for any particular audience. Many other writers have made similar claims; in his case, it was true. Always curious about new developments and also apprehensive where some of them may be taking us, his teenage novels allowed him the scope he needed to continue such dialogues with himself as well as with his readers. But there was always a sustaining narrative there for them as well from a writer who never forgot how to tell a good story at the same time.
The breadth of these interests as they crop up in his stories is wide and unpredictable. She is Not Invisible contains a fascinating study of the part played in our lives by coincidence and its possible link to Jung’s theory of synchronicity. It also delves into the mystery of the Fibonacci spiral and its possible links with the Phi coefficient. Drawing on his experience of studying maths at university if only for the first year, Marcus explains this as the measure of association for two binary variables. The same theme also crops up in The Ghosts of Heaven, featuring four interlinked stories stretching from the Stone Age to life in a sinister American Mental Asylum during the 1920s.
He wrote about social and political issues too. Floodland, his first popular success and winner of the Branford Boase Award, is set in a future Britain covered by sea with Norwich just surviving as an island. Saint Death, taking place on the US/Mexican border, describes the dreadful privations currently faced by the poorest there, with Marcus adding his own comments in a number of one-page essays. This does not make for a comfortable read, but for those that persevere surely an unforgettable one.
The Monsters We Deserve, which includes quotations from Nietzsche in the original German, tells how an author living in a remote mountain house struggles to write a story loosely based on Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein. He is subsequently visited first by her ghost and then by her famous creation in all its gory detail. Are monsters created by authors, he asks himself, or else by the demands of an audience eager for thrills? And once out there, can they take on a life of their own? Ambitious and sometimes hard to follow, this novel was aimed at an adult audience. But Marcus would have welcomed young readers too, never letting up in his determination to push them into new areas of thought.
His most personal novel, Snowflake, AZ, is set in the near future and narrated by teenage Ash in a style of speech somewhere between Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Afflicted by a mystery illness that absorbs all his energy, Ash winds up with a group of fellow-victims living in a community outside a small town in the Arizona desert. They believe they are suffering from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a compound of severe allergies caused by modern day pollutants. Ash stays there for six years, mostly lying in bed but occasionally doing the odd minor chore. In a forward, Marcus describes how he too had previously been struck down in similar fashion. He also had at one time stayed with a group of fellow-sufferers living in America near the real-life town of Snowflake. Whether he too was the victim of increasing air, water and food pollution is left as an open question, but his story finishes with a serious warning for all our futures.
Slim, quietly spoken, consistently thoughtful but with an engaging sense of humour, Marcus when his health allowed was excellent company. He loved researching his novels, with Witch Hill benefiting from his wide reading about the Salem Witch Trials. In Blood Red, Snow White he combines a potted history of Russia written in the form of a fairy tale with an account of Arthur Ransome’s high-wire adventures during and after the revolution. He quotes from authentic Secret Service reports written about Ransome at the time by puzzled British functionaries trying to make sense of what he was up to. Here once again was a quite new story with no connection to anything he had written previously.
A regular visitor to schools and a popular lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, he was also adept in producing light-hearted fare for younger readers. There was also some non-fiction, with All in Your Head: What Happens When Your Doctor Doesn’t Believe You? describing his own fight to have his debilitating condition properly diagnosed. His last, sadly posthumous story Ravencave, published this year by Barrington Stoke, is narrated by a young character who turns out to be a ghost. As he tries to keep up invisibly with his troubled family, a visit to Crackpot Hall in the Yorkshire Dales finally brings some peace to all of them. Crackpot, in this context, is in fact old English for ‘Cave of the ravens.’ How typical that Marcus would have both known this and then incorporated it as one more memorable detail into yet another of his haunting stories. Dying last November aged 54 well before his time, he will be very greatly missed.
Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.
