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The Sixth Seal
After a mysterious catastrophe befalls much of the earth, Muriel, her son Paul, and his friend Henry must learn how to survive in this new, barren, and disturbingly empty world. By the author of A Dubious Legacy.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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About the author
Mary Wesley
63 books181 followersMary Wesley, CBE was an English novelist. She reportedly worked in MI5 during World War II. During her career, she became one of Britain's most successful novelists, selling three million copies of her books, including 10 best-sellers in the last 20 years of her life.
She wrote three children's books, Speaking Terms and The Sixth Seal (both 1969) and Haphazard House (1983), before publishing adult fiction. Since her first adult novel was published only in 1983, when she was 71, she may be regarded as a late bloomer. The publication of Jumping the Queue in 1983 was the beginning of an intensely creative period of Wesley's life. From 1982 to 1991, she wrote and delivered seven novels. While she aged from 70 to 79 she still showed the focus and drive of a young person.
Her best known book, The Camomile Lawn, set on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall, was turned into a television series, and is an account of the intertwining lives of three families in rural England during World War II. After The Camomile Lawn (1984) came Harnessing Peacocks (1985 and as TV film in 1992), The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1986 and filmed in 1995), Not That Sort of Girl (1987), Second Fiddle (1988), A Sensible Life (1990), A Dubious Legacy (1993), An Imaginative Experience (1994) and Part of the Furniture (1997). A book about the West Country with photographer Kim Sayer, Part of the Scenery, was published in 2001. Asked why she had stopped writing fiction at the age of 84, she replied: "If you haven't got anything to say, don't say it.
From Mary Wesley
She wrote three children's books, Speaking Terms and The Sixth Seal (both 1969) and Haphazard House (1983), before publishing adult fiction. Since her first adult novel was published only in 1983, when she was 71, she may be regarded as a late bloomer. The publication of Jumping the Queue in 1983 was the beginning of an intensely creative period of Wesley's life. From 1982 to 1991, she wrote and delivered seven novels. While she aged from 70 to 79 she still showed the focus and drive of a young person.
Her best known book, The Camomile Lawn, set on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall, was turned into a television series, and is an account of the intertwining lives of three families in rural England during World War II. After The Camomile Lawn (1984) came Harnessing Peacocks (1985 and as TV film in 1992), The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1986 and filmed in 1995), Not That Sort of Girl (1987), Second Fiddle (1988), A Sensible Life (1990), A Dubious Legacy (1993), An Imaginative Experience (1994) and Part of the Furniture (1997). A book about the West Country with photographer Kim Sayer, Part of the Scenery, was published in 2001. Asked why she had stopped writing fiction at the age of 84, she replied: "If you haven't got anything to say, don't say it.
From Mary Wesley
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 8, 2010
Well, that was a surprise. In a good way. The less said the better.
Don't expect a whole lot of pace here, though. It all moves pretty slowly...
Don't expect a whole lot of pace here, though. It all moves pretty slowly...
August 15, 2020
Peter Watkins' famous mockumentary "The War Game" was first aired on the BBC in 1966, after months of prevarication, government disquiet & delay.
It is difficult for me to imagine the author of the novel for young adults discussed here - first published in 1969 - was not in some way affected by that shocking programme.
Admittedly, cataclysmic, where not ultimate, end-of-the-world depictions - notably as some variation of divine, cosmic or natural retribution for human wrongdoing - go back through many centuries of literature and culture.
Not least, when we consider Wesley's chosen title, to wit:
"And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind ..." (Revelation, King James Authorised Version, 6:12-13)
But to me, Wesley's descriptions of how at least large numbers of a temporarily surviving British population react to the sudden apocalyptic scenario breaking over them - with a frantic, savage breakdown of any semblance of societal order & panicked, ruthless violence, where the strongest (& also shock law enforcement officers) brutally crush the weak - evoke the primitive responses in Watkins' film.
Here are a few short samples:
"It was horrible. They were quarrelling and fighting."
'Why?'
"It looked as if they were drunk, and that very big man was throwing his weight about and shouting." (p379 of the 1991 omnibus edition, "Magic Landscapes", comprising this, together with "Haphazard House" & "Speaking Terms")
/
"I have been dodging 'the wreckers', as I call them to myself, ever since." (...)
'I don't think there are many people left. (...) I have been watching them fighting among themselves.' (p433)
/
"People were terrified. The strong destroyed the weak. They took a lot of trouble, They cleared the road to the west ad brought in gas and murdered people. They shot people (...)"
'Ordinary people don't behave like that', James said.
'These were not ordinary people, they were terrified people, not dumb-bells like you who know how to behave.' (p449)
To clarify, it is not nuclear missile or atom bomb attacks that bring about the disaster & outbreak of an open, murderous dystopia in Wesley's novel. It projects other causes & reasons for the horror that comes to pass over the face of the Earth, which I will not spoil the reader's suspense detailing here.
Suffice it to say that what appears swept away, (literally) kicking and screaming, in this particular 1969 version of The Deluge are two broad sweeps of the population:
On the one hand, a world of truculent, selfish, callous, inconsiderate, where not fanatical people of destructive impulses.
On the other hand, also huge numbers of people who are found to be "superficial" (a pun, if you read the novel, this pun will become evident) who treat life as routine, who are used to taking life & people for granted, as somehow self-explanatory, sleepwalking as it were.
I'd note that, if the reader becomes aware of several key episodes in the novelist's personal life, this impression this takes on even more force:
The characteristic selection of small-minded people who are either unlucky to be "blown away" like dust, or ultimately destroy also themselves in a fear-fuelled lust to trample on others, reads also like a national and global allegory on the part of the author.
With elements of a wishful, yet puckishly expressed poetic justice.
I'd add that the shocking disintegration of social norms, coherences, cohesions & basic decencies brought on by the successful, covert promotion of a brutish, narrow-minded, self-centred fanaticism seems all too topical again in the decade of the 2010s.
Do examples need spelling out?
In the novel, those who, perhaps bizarrely, are spared extinction, and who - very gradually in the course of the story - discover contact with one together, and then seek a new start in their shared and individual ways through life, are a very mixed, motley congregation of survivors.
Significantly I think, if you compare character traits and qualities (or lack of them) of the others, detailed in the paragraph five above this, the enduring survivors are a strikingly colourful, lively assembly of characters.
What throught their many differences they appear to have in common is precisely those features - colour, character, and "life".
Personal variants of human depth: an absolutely unfanatical ability to reflect, & think anew, thoughtfulness and fairness (also towards others), an undying curiosity, a (sometimes wry) humour, an unbeaten resourcefulness & not least, an appreciation of life.
The enduring survivors in the novel are also generally inclined to preservation of real lives (rather than obsessed abstract schemes, philistine self-satisfaction, or in a sudden crisis, blind wrecking & destruction).
Such fostering impulses extend to the protection and tending of animals of many kinds - a connection here to "Speaking Terms", published that same year of 1969.
This does not mean that the survivors suffer fanatical, glib or witless fools - see the various elaborations above - at all gladly.
Towards the end of the book, a partly Edenic (but not entirely Edenic) regeneration of life, society and a wider world comes into view ... and prospect.
An Eden with a difference, however.
Wesley's Catholic faith runs prominently through the novel. However, there is nothing stuffily solemn or even metaphysical about this adherence to faith: let alone pharisaic or exceptionalist, millenarian. That faith appears mainly in the form of practical belief in mutual human assistance & community fellowship, which seeks to build on hope - hope which in human contact also lessens the buildup of fear that might be overwhelming in embattled, adverse, arduous circumstances.
The survivors are not marked principally by primal innocence, like Adam or Eve. They are wilier, more cussed, more knowing and adventurous than that.
However, "innocent" in the etymological sense of not wishing malice, hurt, damage or destruction on others - that definition fits quite well. The survivors prove all to be life-affirming in their very different ways - however headstrong, vain, stubborn or roguish some of them are. (And they are.)
I would strongly commend & recommend this novel.
It is a page-turner, its pace generally brisk, between andante and allegretto: with rests for when the characters sleep - particularly the main character, not exactly a Mother Earth or Mother Nature, but a Mother Human certainly.
The novel makes for an absorbing experience, morally engaging too in its own Wesleyan way, and can be difficult to put down even whenever Muriel inserts rests into the score of the piece by conspicuously going to bed.
One small spoke in the wheel of the book's progress is - as also with some later Wesley novels - at least on the basis of the large-format hardback omnibus edition I read, it can in places be confusing to work out exactly which character in a group is speaking. Gaps - paragraphing or spaces on the page - and some character identifications might be more clearly marked in places.
Finally, to the question of the intended readership. Is it a fair question to ask whether with her first two novels, the author had entirely worked this one out? There seems as much a drive to express, as a need to communicate with a particular age group or target audience of any kind.
The novel under discussion, also "Speaking Terms" & finally the much later "Haphazard House" (1983; which I'd wish to review in due course) constitute what are considered the total of Wesley's three novels "for children".
Hmmm. Certainly they can appeal - as high-quality "children's literature" (an odd misnomer!) always does - also to readers of any age with a fresh unjaundiced eye, and a readiness to suspend disbelief for a fast-moving, colourful. lively, and never quite predictable set of storylines & events.
On the other hand, given the dark theme and its in places distinctively sinister treatment, some might suggest that this novel of over 200 apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic pages might be a challenging read for "kids": even, perhaps, the bold, undaunted children of the Age of Aquarius.
For my part, I'd say the great tradition (even before 1914) of literature for young adults & older children is not exclusively limited to sweetness, warmth and light.
There is in fact plenty of milk of human kindness in the book, sometimes half concealed in fantasy and characteristically impish Wesleyan mischief, in tone, dialogue, plot turns and characterisation.
So - after proposing a caveat, of issuing a "Whoops Apocalypse" warning for anyone young or old enough to have night scares - my verdict would be to let readers of any age, apprised of the book's general theme and content, try her or his luck with it.
Wild as it may be, in my view, it is likely to prove well worth the effort.
It is difficult for me to imagine the author of the novel for young adults discussed here - first published in 1969 - was not in some way affected by that shocking programme.
Admittedly, cataclysmic, where not ultimate, end-of-the-world depictions - notably as some variation of divine, cosmic or natural retribution for human wrongdoing - go back through many centuries of literature and culture.
Not least, when we consider Wesley's chosen title, to wit:
"And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind ..." (Revelation, King James Authorised Version, 6:12-13)
But to me, Wesley's descriptions of how at least large numbers of a temporarily surviving British population react to the sudden apocalyptic scenario breaking over them - with a frantic, savage breakdown of any semblance of societal order & panicked, ruthless violence, where the strongest (& also shock law enforcement officers) brutally crush the weak - evoke the primitive responses in Watkins' film.
Here are a few short samples:
"It was horrible. They were quarrelling and fighting."
'Why?'
"It looked as if they were drunk, and that very big man was throwing his weight about and shouting." (p379 of the 1991 omnibus edition, "Magic Landscapes", comprising this, together with "Haphazard House" & "Speaking Terms")
/
"I have been dodging 'the wreckers', as I call them to myself, ever since." (...)
'I don't think there are many people left. (...) I have been watching them fighting among themselves.' (p433)
/
"People were terrified. The strong destroyed the weak. They took a lot of trouble, They cleared the road to the west ad brought in gas and murdered people. They shot people (...)"
'Ordinary people don't behave like that', James said.
'These were not ordinary people, they were terrified people, not dumb-bells like you who know how to behave.' (p449)
To clarify, it is not nuclear missile or atom bomb attacks that bring about the disaster & outbreak of an open, murderous dystopia in Wesley's novel. It projects other causes & reasons for the horror that comes to pass over the face of the Earth, which I will not spoil the reader's suspense detailing here.
Suffice it to say that what appears swept away, (literally) kicking and screaming, in this particular 1969 version of The Deluge are two broad sweeps of the population:
On the one hand, a world of truculent, selfish, callous, inconsiderate, where not fanatical people of destructive impulses.
On the other hand, also huge numbers of people who are found to be "superficial" (a pun, if you read the novel, this pun will become evident) who treat life as routine, who are used to taking life & people for granted, as somehow self-explanatory, sleepwalking as it were.
I'd note that, if the reader becomes aware of several key episodes in the novelist's personal life, this impression this takes on even more force:
The characteristic selection of small-minded people who are either unlucky to be "blown away" like dust, or ultimately destroy also themselves in a fear-fuelled lust to trample on others, reads also like a national and global allegory on the part of the author.
With elements of a wishful, yet puckishly expressed poetic justice.
I'd add that the shocking disintegration of social norms, coherences, cohesions & basic decencies brought on by the successful, covert promotion of a brutish, narrow-minded, self-centred fanaticism seems all too topical again in the decade of the 2010s.
Do examples need spelling out?
In the novel, those who, perhaps bizarrely, are spared extinction, and who - very gradually in the course of the story - discover contact with one together, and then seek a new start in their shared and individual ways through life, are a very mixed, motley congregation of survivors.
Significantly I think, if you compare character traits and qualities (or lack of them) of the others, detailed in the paragraph five above this, the enduring survivors are a strikingly colourful, lively assembly of characters.
What throught their many differences they appear to have in common is precisely those features - colour, character, and "life".
Personal variants of human depth: an absolutely unfanatical ability to reflect, & think anew, thoughtfulness and fairness (also towards others), an undying curiosity, a (sometimes wry) humour, an unbeaten resourcefulness & not least, an appreciation of life.
The enduring survivors in the novel are also generally inclined to preservation of real lives (rather than obsessed abstract schemes, philistine self-satisfaction, or in a sudden crisis, blind wrecking & destruction).
Such fostering impulses extend to the protection and tending of animals of many kinds - a connection here to "Speaking Terms", published that same year of 1969.
This does not mean that the survivors suffer fanatical, glib or witless fools - see the various elaborations above - at all gladly.
Towards the end of the book, a partly Edenic (but not entirely Edenic) regeneration of life, society and a wider world comes into view ... and prospect.
An Eden with a difference, however.
Wesley's Catholic faith runs prominently through the novel. However, there is nothing stuffily solemn or even metaphysical about this adherence to faith: let alone pharisaic or exceptionalist, millenarian. That faith appears mainly in the form of practical belief in mutual human assistance & community fellowship, which seeks to build on hope - hope which in human contact also lessens the buildup of fear that might be overwhelming in embattled, adverse, arduous circumstances.
The survivors are not marked principally by primal innocence, like Adam or Eve. They are wilier, more cussed, more knowing and adventurous than that.
However, "innocent" in the etymological sense of not wishing malice, hurt, damage or destruction on others - that definition fits quite well. The survivors prove all to be life-affirming in their very different ways - however headstrong, vain, stubborn or roguish some of them are. (And they are.)
I would strongly commend & recommend this novel.
It is a page-turner, its pace generally brisk, between andante and allegretto: with rests for when the characters sleep - particularly the main character, not exactly a Mother Earth or Mother Nature, but a Mother Human certainly.
The novel makes for an absorbing experience, morally engaging too in its own Wesleyan way, and can be difficult to put down even whenever Muriel inserts rests into the score of the piece by conspicuously going to bed.
One small spoke in the wheel of the book's progress is - as also with some later Wesley novels - at least on the basis of the large-format hardback omnibus edition I read, it can in places be confusing to work out exactly which character in a group is speaking. Gaps - paragraphing or spaces on the page - and some character identifications might be more clearly marked in places.
Finally, to the question of the intended readership. Is it a fair question to ask whether with her first two novels, the author had entirely worked this one out? There seems as much a drive to express, as a need to communicate with a particular age group or target audience of any kind.
The novel under discussion, also "Speaking Terms" & finally the much later "Haphazard House" (1983; which I'd wish to review in due course) constitute what are considered the total of Wesley's three novels "for children".
Hmmm. Certainly they can appeal - as high-quality "children's literature" (an odd misnomer!) always does - also to readers of any age with a fresh unjaundiced eye, and a readiness to suspend disbelief for a fast-moving, colourful. lively, and never quite predictable set of storylines & events.
On the other hand, given the dark theme and its in places distinctively sinister treatment, some might suggest that this novel of over 200 apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic pages might be a challenging read for "kids": even, perhaps, the bold, undaunted children of the Age of Aquarius.
For my part, I'd say the great tradition (even before 1914) of literature for young adults & older children is not exclusively limited to sweetness, warmth and light.
There is in fact plenty of milk of human kindness in the book, sometimes half concealed in fantasy and characteristically impish Wesleyan mischief, in tone, dialogue, plot turns and characterisation.
So - after proposing a caveat, of issuing a "Whoops Apocalypse" warning for anyone young or old enough to have night scares - my verdict would be to let readers of any age, apprised of the book's general theme and content, try her or his luck with it.
Wild as it may be, in my view, it is likely to prove well worth the effort.
April 29, 2020
A book that has echoes of Day of the Triffids, one of my favourite books, which is why I started reading this.
It is written for a younger reader, and perhaps as a consequent lacks detail on the main questions raised by the book, but the concept is intriguing and curiously the story draws you in. The pace was a bit slow at times, and the visit to London was only a small part of the book, despite the cover blurb majoring on this.
It is written for a younger reader, and perhaps as a consequent lacks detail on the main questions raised by the book, but the concept is intriguing and curiously the story draws you in. The pace was a bit slow at times, and the visit to London was only a small part of the book, despite the cover blurb majoring on this.
June 9, 2022
What an odd book. Interesting take on a mass death / post-apocalyptic situation. Very quiet. Very orderly in some ways. And everyone basically gets along.
It was entertaining to watch Muriel gather in person after person as they create their own little self-sufficient community. There's only a bit of danger at one point and no one is ever close to going without.
The characters are more types than people but for this book it works.
It was entertaining to watch Muriel gather in person after person as they create their own little self-sufficient community. There's only a bit of danger at one point and no one is ever close to going without.
The characters are more types than people but for this book it works.
May 26, 2010
Was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this childrens post apocalyptic story. Nothing is explined in great detail, and the story takes the childish jumps that kid's book do, but I still enjoyed it immensely.
March 29, 2021
It's fascinating to read an after the apocalypse novel set in the past. Very strange. A slow mesmeric novel with a few sudden flurries (particularly in London where the action is hectic and improbable). Intriguing set of characters.
January 8, 2017
An odd book, that stays with you .
April 22, 2021
In some ways not your typical post-apocalyptic book. In other ways just average. I liked the characters and the location. Not Mary Wesley's best.
August 15, 2021
This had curiosity value for me. I read all, and enjoyed several, of Wesley’s novels a few decades ago, cheered by her fame as an author first published aged 70. But Wikipedia says she published three children's books that I’d not heard of: Speaking Terms (1969), The Sixth Seal (1969) and Haphazard House (1983), and it was her first *adult* novel that was published in 1983, when she was 71. My revised 1984 edition of The Sixth Seal doesn’t name the 1969 publisher. I’ve tracked down a first edition in Australia and have asked the bookseller if they can tell me who that was, or was it self-published.
It’s more for young adults than children, a post-apocalyptic story of survivors finding each other and starting to rebuild society in Devon after most humans and other animals are wiped out in a mysterious storm. It has Wesley’s hallmark quirky dialogue and terse no nonsense prose, showing the roots of her later adult fiction. It was an easy humorous read, but hasn’t tempted me to revisit her novels, which I think would be too whimsical for my tastes now.
It’s more for young adults than children, a post-apocalyptic story of survivors finding each other and starting to rebuild society in Devon after most humans and other animals are wiped out in a mysterious storm. It has Wesley’s hallmark quirky dialogue and terse no nonsense prose, showing the roots of her later adult fiction. It was an easy humorous read, but hasn’t tempted me to revisit her novels, which I think would be too whimsical for my tastes now.
September 19, 2021
An odd book that is more about the personalities than the situation that drew them together
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews