Best Books To Read
Ways With Words
Books Video
Children's Book Reviews
The Seeing by Diana Hendry: review
Whitbread award-winning author and poet Diana Hendry has written a dark and memorable novel about children in a postwar British seaside resort who are convinced they can track down 'Left-Over Nazis', a game that has devastating consequences.
The Seeing is by former Whitbread award winner Diana Hendry
By Martin Chilton, Digital Culture Editor
Adults should not be put off if they see poet Diana Hendry's novel The Seeing described as "her first children's book in a decade". This wise and unsettling tale will captivate discerning readers of any age.
Hugo, a painter living in a small caravan in Norton in postwar Britain, thinks he has found his subjects for the summer - three oddball children roaming around the seaside resort.
Hendry, who was born in the Wirral in 1941, and grew up by the sea, captures a time when children were off the leash, unsupervised, making and keeping secrets, unwilling or unable to confide in their parents.
The secret kept by this trio - teenagers Lizzie and Natalie, and the latter's eight-year brother Philip - is an insidious one. They believe they can unearth and punish Left-Over Nazis ("sleepers").
Hendry's descriptions of Natalie, the menacing ringleader, are concise, cutting and lyrical. She's wild. "Wild as a cat . . . as wild as the sea in winter." She plays mind games. Newly arrived to Norton, she is desperate to take revenge on a torpid place and a time when "quiet and peaceful means pretending everything's all right when it isn't." She reveals in her diary her powers of manipulation. She knows people stick with you, "if you keep them scared".
Saving Daisy by Phil Earle: review
Jim Carrington's gripping drama for teenagers
Teenage tale of terror and betrayal
My Sister Lives On The Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher: review
Lizzie is the daughter of a safe middle-class Jewish mother (ostracised by her family after 'marrying out', she is focussed on other daughter Lal's impending wedding and oblivious to her teenager's dilemmas). Lizzie is awkwardly trying to work out who she is. "It gave me a shiver to think there were two of me. A kind of home and away me, like they say at football matches," she says. She wonders, rightly of course, 'how can evil just stop?' when Natalie demands she joins in the Nazi hunt. She is vulnerable to her power, attracted to her danger.
And there is Philip. Forget the misleading Harry Potter-type picture on the cover - this boy is a spooky, interesting child. He has second sight (a cruel twist, given that he wears glasses that are useless) and can see "swastikas on their hearts" in visions about people that come via his dead father. His deadbeat prostitute mum calls him a "mistake and a freak".
Watching all this, without realising what treacherous ground he is on, is Hugo. It's a neat device to have Hugo's viewpoint in the long letters he writes to his sister. Hugo discerns uneasily that the boy "is a bit psychic" and he guesses that the mum is on the game. But he has his own problems. He's recovering from a nervous breakdown and full of remorse and guilt over the death of family members at the hands of the Gestapo. Hugo seems a kindly man. Yet an aside in one letter, that he sent the boy home "with a pat on the behind", leaps out. A harmless 1950s gesture or something to ring alarms bells for a 2012 reader? Nothing more is said. Decide for yourself. And see the problem with suspicion. It's easy is to sow doubt about fellow human beings. Lizzie comes to believe that a friendly garage worker called Sam Dingle is a Nazi 'sleeper' and comments: "His face, I now saw, was sharp as a fox's."
Natalie is also at the age of being sexualised - an aspect drawn in subtle, revealing touches, via the seedy client who says her mother is "past it" and slurs "you're next in line" as he stumbles down the stairs; or shown in the way Natalie slyly agrees to be drawn by Hugo and turns up wearing scarlet lipstick. She keeps uncrossing and recrossing her legs. What Hugo sees instead is the rage in the girl's heart, and after she is painted like an "absurd bird of prey", she attacks the paintings with a knife.
The class system of postwar Britain is shown in deft ways by Hendry - who has worked as a typist, a journalist, a teacher and was writer-in-residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary - including when Natalie scornfully writes of Lizzie that "anyone would think she thought coming to a council estate and eating baked beans on toast was an adventure." There are also touches of humour. When Dottie, a preachy little girl inspired by evangelist Billy Graham, criticises Lizzie's home, the scene ends with the line: "Then she sat down in front of the television and hogged the biscuits."
Hendry, who lives in Edinburgh, has written more than 40 books for children and has two grown-up kids of her own and three grand-children. She has an assured hand writing about children. One of the most hurtful things that Natalie says to Lizzie is that she has "a small imagination".
The book (which was nominated for a Costa award in November 2012) builds to a dark, destructive ending (which I won't give away) but what you remember are the memorable, finely drawn and vivid characters - and the fractured time in which they are growing up. As Hugo says about the children in a letter: "Although they are too young to know the war, they have somehow been blighted by it. It's almost as if they were born with the knowledge of war in their genes like a terrible inheritance."
Diana Hendry: The Seeing (Bodley Head)
Book news »
Book Reviews »
Fiction Reviews »
Telegraph Book Shop
Books on Amazon.co.uk
In Children's Book Reviews
The 100 novels everyone should read
The 85 best books of 2014
180 great children's quiz questions (and the answers)
Perfectly silly party games
The world's 16 most spectacular libraries
More books news
Culture Galleries
100 funny jokes by 100 comedians
80 great quotes about love and romance
The best British political insults
The Simpsons: 40 best quotations
30 great one-liners
A history of the world in funny puns
Like Telegraph Books on Facebook
Culture Video»
Oscars 2016 highlights
Chris Rock's funniest Oscars jokes
Come Dine with Me producer wins Oscar
Leo attends the Oscars after-party
Lady Gaga sings with sexual abuse survivors
Oscars 2016: Red carpet highlights
Telegraph Books»
Robert Weintraub's No Better Friend
One Man, One Dog, and Their Incredible Story of Courage and Survival in World War II
Winston Churchill at the Telegraph
A collection of the best contributions and reports from the Telegraph focussing on the key events, decisions and moments in Churchill's life
Sinclair McKay's The Secret Life Of Fighter Command
This book tells the story of the men and women of Fighter Command who worked tirelessly in air bases scattered throughout Britain to thwart the Nazis
Pet Tales : Extraordinary Pets from Ordinary Homes
The essential gift book for any pet lover - real-life tales of devoted dogs, rebellious cats and other unforgettable four-legged friends
The Birds of America
A complete edition of John James Audubon's world famous The Birds of America, bound in linen and beautifully presented in a special slipcase
Culture Critics