Book Review: The Kingdom by the Sea

Title: The Kingdom by the Sea

Author: Robert Westall

Date: 1990

Publisher: Methuen (U.K.), Harper Collins (U.S.)

ISBN: none

Length: 176 pages

Quote: “Ask him where the rest are. There should be four in this shelter.”

Harry was the only one of his immediate family who reached the shelter before the firebomb destroyed his home. Now he’s a homeless orphan, sneaking around the gritty industrial northeast coast of war-ravaged England. His goal is to avoid staying with his sentimental Cousin Elsie, whose sympathy for his bereavement would be more than he thinks he can endure.

With the dog from another bombed-out house as his own trustworthy friend, Harry faces many dangers more serious than being cuddled and cried over during a summer of adventures. Other kids threaten to beat him up. A farmer threatens to shoot his dog. A hasty lie he tells to discourage busybodies threatens to attract even more unwanted attention. He’s thrown out of a church for hesitating to buy a biography of its patron saint. He and his dog become the mascots of some friendly soldiers, until a pedophile officer scares him away. In his most perilous adventure, Harry injures his dog in the process of saving its life.

Lots of kids found themselves in predicaments like Harry’s in the 1940s. Many came to worse ends than having to live with ooey-gooey relatives. For a war orphan Harry gets one of the happiest of the possible endings.

One of the main selling points of this book is that, without dwelling unnecessarily on the details, it warns boys about pedophiles.

In the English-speaking world, girls are told ad nauseam that they’re rape bait. The likelihood of any individual girl being molested when she’s not flirting or joyriding with men has always been exaggerated, and still is, by adults who don’t like to face the fact that, statistically, most girls are molested indoors, at home or in other places we want to imagine are “safe.” Boys are often not warned. Boys’ adventure stories often play into the fantasy that a thirteen-year-old boy is stronger and smarter than any of the men he knows; more realistic stories surround boy characters with men who may be crooks, smugglers, or even murderers, but are not pedophiles.

In real life pedophiles are rare, but more numerous than serial murderers. In real life many pedophiles are nonviolent. They want to corrupt an otherwise good relationship by “lovingly introducing” a student or stepchild to what they hope will be a consensual, if illegal, relationship, rather than do anything they recognize as hurting a child. Nobody recommends that teenagers go looking for adventures on mean city streets at night, but most rapes take place in the victims’ homes, and are committed by housemates or regular visitors. Neither boys nor girls should be given the impression that they need to be constantly “protected” from being alone or being outdoors. They don’t. Often their greatest danger comes from their so-called protectors.

Teenagers need to know the real profile of a pedophile. Pedophiles’ physical sexual preferences vary. They are not necessarily either homosexual or sadistic. They are in varying degrees cowards who’ve failed to form relationships with adults. They like to blame other adults’ “bitterness” for driving them to seek “loving” relationships with “innocent, virginal” younger people. Their definitions of “loving” may be sketchy and fantasy-based; then again, when societies have recognized such marriages as valid, many teenagers have married older people, and some of those marriages have been satisfactory while they lasted.

Parents understandably feel that any risk is unacceptable when they think of their sons or daughters being grabbed, stuffed into the back of a car, and hauled away for Immoral Purposes—but in fact that’s rare. In real life the harm pedophiles do is more often like what happens to Harry. During a week of extreme vulnerability, he meets some nice, kind soldiers who let him do chores and errands in exchange for things he needs. He’s comfortable with taking orders from “Sarge,” being tossed up in the air by “The Scotsman,” even leaning against “Uncle Artie” and knowing that he can enjoy such moments of family-like feeling without any risk of pain, shame, or even embarrassing sentimentality about “Poor little orphan Harry.” Then creepy Corporal Merman, hated by the others for other sufficient reasons, corners Harry when he’s alone and offers Harry candy, but disgusts Harry with his sneaky verbal attacks and “the feel of Merman’s fingertips on his lips.” This scene is ugly and getting uglier when the other soldiers interrupt it.

Arguably the real harm Merman has done to Harry is to suggest that Artie “wants the same thing from you as me.” Probably this isn’t true. Probably the next kind man Harry meets, who identifies himself as a bereaved father but whose description suggests the “gay” stereotype, really does see Harry as a replacement for his long-lost son. The “gay” stereotype is the stereotype of a passive man in search of a more aggressive macho man, not a predatory pedophile in search of a boy. Murgatroyd behaves very well toward Harry—the neighbors who judge him should only have behaved half so well, earlier in the story—yet even his name (Harry calls him “Mr M”) can’t help reminding Harry, forever, that it’s not a good idea for any teenager to spend much time alone with any adult.

This part of the plot makes it possible for The Kingdom by the Sea to be marketed as a “First Book About Pedophiles and How to Avoid Them,” which is undoubtedly what Westall was asked to write—because, if any twentieth century writer could write a book of that kind that anyone would want to read, Westall was that writer. But it’s an adventure story, not a teaching story. It won a Guardian Award, generally a reliable guide to a good read.

Westall excelled at topophilia, presenting a rather flat and industrialized part of the world, which few people love, in a loving yet unsentimental and cliché-free way. He also excelled at writing in a consistently masculine, heterosexual way, even when telling a third-person story from the viewpoint of a female protagonist. (He created at least three distinct, credible, likable female protagonists: Anne of The Watch House, Beth of The Wind Eye, and Lucy of A Place for Me. The Kingdom by the Sea is not about them, and has only minor parts for female characters.) He’s written tightly plotted novels; Kingdom isn’t one of them. It has more of the feeling of a real memoir, where incidents don’t necessarily connect to one another. Readers see that each of Harry’s adventures is a scrape from which he luckily escapes; Harry doesn’t give himself time to reflect on that, but does give himself time to experience the exhilarating energy surges of adolescence and convince us that, although he’s in mortal danger, he’s enjoying it.

What’s not to like? The ending surprised me so much that I want to call it contrived, tacked on, implausible. Real history records that many things stranger than that really happened during that war. In the early twentieth century, a PBS documentary turned up two old men, cousins, who had mourned for each other’s death in 1939 and never realized that they’d survived the war years within a mile of each other in London. Both had matured from homeless refugees into comfortably retired grandfathers; both were still able to travel, meet, and reminisce. I liked the fictionalized memoir in The Machine Gunners and Fathom Five, the time-travel fantasy in The Wind Eye, the cat as catalyst of time-travel in The Devil on the Road, and the goofy but impeccable logic of “a nice ghost haunted by a nasty ghost” in The Watch House, better; those books were published in the U.S. toward the end of my fiction-reading phase and became real favorites. Well, The Kingdom by the Sea is good enough to join those earlier books on the shelf. Obviously your preferences among Westall’s books have nothing to do with my having, to some extent, outgrown fiction.

This is a story about a survivor who finds joy in a time and place that were about as discouraging as reality gets. If bombed-out ruins, industrial slag heaps, crumbling boxcars, and deserted towers that are open for use by homeless people but accessible only by “sand bridges” that appear at low tide, feel like images of your mood, Harry’s perspective may cheer you. If you’re trying frantically to escape from anxious or depressive moods by filling your mind with moonlight-and-roses imagery, you probably already know to steer clear of the whole British war memoir genre; many Americans’ memories of the early 1940s are wholesome, innocent, pretty stories; British memories of those years can be wholesome and inspiring, but not innocent, and not pretty.

You didn’t really need either of those warnings but the publisher thought you need this warning. The Kingdom of the Sea is not a real war memoir, although it reads like one. Some novels and novelists are good enough to inspire guided tours of the places where the stories are set. Westall was one of those novelists. That’s why he was asked to introduce Kingdom with a warning that it’s not a reliable guidebook for tours of the northeast coast of England. It’s obviously based on real war memoirs, but not the ones Westall mixes in with the news item that formed the main plot of The Machine Gunners, and probably not the ones of any single individual in the real world. Kingdom feels like fact but it’s fiction.

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