The Foreshadowing tells the story of Alexandra, a 17 year old girl from Victorian London. Alexandra has visions of the future, in particular she has visions of the deaths of those around her and of her family.
Though it is Alexandra’s vision of her brother’s death in WWI and her journey to the fields of France to try to prevent it that drives the plot of the novel, that isn’t the most resonant part of the novel. Rather it is Sedgewick’s description of the nursing of, and the nurses that care for, the injured servicemen that carries.
Alexandra’s portents of imminent deaths are explained by way of allusion and reference to Cassandra, this is only briefly touched on and I suppose would encourage readers to look up the Trojan myths themselves.
I have to confess that I didn’t really enjoy this novel, though I understand I’m not the target audience. I didn’t like the two dimensional quality of her parents, Victorian stereotypes of stern patriarch and submissive, weak-willed mother and I found the supernatural element to the novel predictable. However, that said the novel did teach me things I didn’t know, I understood very little about the role of VAD nurses beforehand, and I think that Sedgewick portrayed the ‘shellshock’ victims sensitively, showing the reader a time when the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder was only beginning to gather medical and public attention, and remains a sensitive issue to this day.
Similarly, Sedgewick delivers the horrors of the WWI trenches, men with facial wounds that ‘stop them looking human’ (p.64). Through the eyes of the VAD nurses the statistics of the injured and the dead become more comprehensible, the sheer volume of those arriving at the field hospital, day by day. Sedgewick juxtaposes the reality of war with the jingoism in which it was received at home, Alexandra says,
‘When I look at a broken body, all I feel is sadness. Not pride, not pity, or horror or hatred. To me those are false feelings, emotions we put on top of our sadness … because we don’t want to feel afraid’ (p.65).
Overall, as we approach of the centenary of the outbreak of WWI, this book is a good tool for reflecting the nature of war in a slightly different way to other novels, such as Private Peaceful, which may make it appealing to young readers.