The Seeing - Diana Hendry

‘Because how can evil just stop…?’

The novel opens with a prologue that introduces us to Lizzie; she is dreaming and is evidently distressed, and we know that something upsetting has happened. Then we are taken back to when she first met Natalie and her younger brother Philip. Well-behaved thirteen-year-old Lizzie is immediately drawn to the much wilder Natalie when she entered the classroom for the first time:

‘I looked at her and she reached to my heart. She went straight there, as if there was something in her that was in me too, only I hadn’t known it before and though I didn’t know what it was, I knew it was important. I wanted her for my friend like I’d never wanted anything before.’

Soon Lizzie is spending much of her time with her, she feels they are kindred spirits and she has left behind her former best friends Alice and Dottie, becoming more adventurous and venturing ‘off the beaten track’ as her mother calls it. There is a contrast in their home lives; whilst Lizzie’s family is proud to be moving up in the world, Natalie’s home life seems unsettled and somewhat impoverished. It’s the mid 1950s and thoughts of World War II still occupy both Lizzie and Natalie’s minds. Natalie then reveals to Lizzie that Philip has a strange gift, an ability to see, and she is convinced that he can identify ‘left-over Nazis’ from the war who are living amongst them, perhaps waiting to strike, and she believes that together the three of them can be the ones to rid the place of these people, of the evil that still lives on. She seems driven in this by the fact that her father died in the war. What starts as an exciting plan to Lizzie soon becomes something much more terrible.

We also learn of an artist who has visited Norton, the small seaside town which is the setting of the novel, for several years, setting up in his yellow caravan and painting, hoping to forget the painful wartime memories he carries with him. The story has a main first-person narrative from Lizzie’s point of view, but also features letters from the painter, Hugo, to his sister, and then it also includes extracts from Natalie’s diary, so we are able to look at events from several different perspectives and gain insight into their backgrounds. I felt Lizzie was a little naïve to be drawn so easily into Natalie’s ways but it’s quite possible that in her innocence she would have just been so taken with her, so intrigued by her and by this powerful new friendship that she was caught up in the situation.

I don’t think I’ve read much fiction before that has looked at the impact and legacy of the effects of war specifically on children, so this is a clever approach for the author to take, and she’s not afraid to explore dark, disturbing thoughts and feelings that the children may have had about the war. This is a well-paced, inventive, dark and mysterious historical tale for young adult readers and I’d certainly say it’s strong and powerful enough for adults too; I found it fascinating, compelling, unsettling and sad, and the cover image is fittingly rather haunting too. 

Published by The Bodley Head

How to be a Good Wife - Emma Chapman

‘And there it is again, that strange echoing fear, slipping through the cracks that have formed in the memory.’

This is a haunting debut novel with a mesmerising voice at its heart.

Marta recounts the events in her days to us and we question what is real and true. She has been married to Hector, twenty years her senior, for many years, and their son Kylan is grown-up and lives away from home now. Marta keenly feels his absence.

Marta’s days are structured, she checks the time a lot, she goes to the market at a set time. She has no friends, and is dominated by Hector and by her mother-in-law Matilda. The atmospheric setting is an unnamed Scandinavian town.

She has stopped taking her medication and finds that memories are resurfacing of a room, and a girl with blonde hair keeps appearing before Marta. Who is she, does Marta recognize her, is she from the past, why does she seem increasingly familiar?

‘Looking over my shoulder, I see myself in the steamed mirror. I don’t want to push the girl away, to deny these things I have been seeing. There’s a sense that it would be fruitless anyway: like trying to sink a cork in a basin full of water. It will always rise to the surface again.’

Marta begins to doubt the whole basis that her current life is founded on and her husband Hector seems to then be cast in a different light.

How to be a Good Wife boasts a gripping narrative with Marta’s arresting voice. She thinks she recalls images from her past, but are they real? Is what she remembers the truth, is she paranoid, is it the effect of having stopped taking her medication?

She doubts herself, her imaginings, and the reader doubts her too. I totally believed in her, and was scared and anxious as I read on, riveted.

The feeling of Marta being trapped is utterly real. Her marriage, her home, the place she lives, it all feels so claustrophobic.

I wanted to know how this woman’s life could have been so curtailed, her identity reduced to almost nothing, and why, by whom – by her own illness and limitations, by the calm yet crippling control of her husband, by her forgotten past?

This is intelligent fiction, making the reader think and question everything. Is Marta an unreliable narrator or is everything she says and thinks true? Can she trust her husband, can she trust her own senses – the smells she recalls, the sounds she is hearing, the sights that appear to her.

‘There is something, just out of reach, which I can feel shifting inside me. I shut my eyes, willing it to come forward. It’s a smell first, of detergent and sweat, and a rapid image that shuttles before my eyes too fast for me to grasp….The picture spreads for a moment like ink through blotting paper, and then just as quickly, it is gone.’

It’s an emotional, edgy experience to read this book, riddled as it is with uncertainty and deception.

This is an amazing, cleverly written debut by Emma Chapman; it is compelling, insightful and unsettling – I was hooked throughout and have been thinking about it a lot; it keeps a hold of you long after you've finished reading.

Reviewed by Lindsay Healy

Published by Picador on 3rd January 2013
Reviewed as part of the amazon vine programme

You can follow the author on twitter @emmajchapman