Barry Unsworth. (2012). The Quality of Mercy: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Barry Unsworth. 2012. The Quality of Mercy: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Barry Unsworth, The Quality of Mercy: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Barry Unsworth. The Quality of Mercy: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Unsworth, Barry
   • bioText: BARRY UNSWORTH, who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker finalist for Pascali's Island and Morality Play and was long-listed for the Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel. His other works include The Songs of the Kings, After Hannibal, Losing Nelson, and Land of Marvels.
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The Quality of Mercy

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Barry Unsworth returns to the terrain of his Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger, this time following Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, son of a Liverpool slave ship owner who hanged himself. It is the spring of 1767, and to avenge his father's death, Erasmus Kemp has had the rebellious sailors of his father's ship, including Sullivan, brought back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy. But as the novel opens, a blithe Sullivan has escaped and is making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing as he goes and sleeping where he can.
His destination is Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell the family how Billy met his end.
In this village, Billy's sister, Nan, and her miner husband, James Bordon, live with their three sons, all destined to follow their father down the pit. The youngest, only seven, is enjoying his last summer aboveground.
Meanwhile, in London, a passionate anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved in a second case relating to the lost ship. Erasmus Kemp wants compensation for the cargo of sick slaves who were thrown overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurers who dispute his claim. Despite their polarized views on slavery, Ashton's beautiful sister, Jane, encounters Erasmus Kemp and finds herself powerfully attracted to him.
Lord Spenton, who owns coal mines in East-Durham, has extravagant habits and is pressed for money. When he applies to the Kemp merchant bank for a loan, Erasmus sees a business opportunity of the kind he has long been hoping for, a way of gaining entry into Britain's rapidly developing and highly profitable coal and steel industries.
Thus he too makes his way north, to the very same village that Sullivan is heading for . . .
With historical sweep and deep pathos, Unsworth explores the struggles of the powerless and the captive against the rich and the powerful, and what weight mercy may throw on the scales of justice.

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1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Unsworth is one of the best historical novelists on either side of the Atlantic, and in both Sacred Hunger and The Quality of Mercy his vast knowledge of 18th-century social and material conditions creates a rich and strange rendering of daily life that's utterly persuasive."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
   • content: "Told with bite and freshness. Unsworth, one of the most ingenious and varied of today's British writers, makes his scenes not just vivid but microscopically vivid - we see not only their visible life but the invisible life that pulsates beneath. But what may be more remarkable is the creative subversion he works in his characters. . . . Unsworth gives his figures glittering definition, and then leaves them open and undefined."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Washington Post
   • content: "Unsworth is one of the greatest living historical novelists, and this is what he does best: He entices us back into a past gloriously appointed with archival detail and moral complexity. . . . [The Quality of Mercy] is another engaging demonstration of the talent that's made Unsworth one of the very few writers to appear on the Booker shortlist three times. His sentences recall the sharp detail, moral sensitivity and ready wit of Charles Dickens. But his sense of the lumbering, uneven gait of social progress is more sophisticated, more tempered, one might say, by history."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Deeply moving. . . . Unsworth brings his characters together with authority and grace. As with all of his historical novels, he conveys the sights, sounds and smells of life in another century without the slightest hint of pedantry."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Times
   • content: "Instantly compelling and impeccably written. . . . Line by line, Unsworth is a vigorous and precise writer."
6. • premium: False
   • source: San Antonio Express-News
   • content: "Reading Barry Unsworth, one immediately feel secure in the hands of an experienced pro, a master scribe who knows his way through a story like a seasoned navigator sailing treacherous but familiar seas. . . . [His] latest labor of love is full of gorgeous prose, wonderful dialogue in regional dialect, deeply etched characters, and historical settings both rural and urban one can smell and taste. . . . Endlessly enthralling."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Denver Post
   • content: "Thought- provoking and resonant."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "Wryly, and with Austenesque delicacy, Unsworth presents the intricacies of love, competition, and other timeless human emotions, as well as 18th-century law. Having invented his own brand of historical fiction, characterized by research, imagination, and a literate narrator equally adept at penetrating a society's values or an individual's heart, Unsworth creates a novel that works both as period piece and indictment of industrial capitalism. . . . It succeeds in presenting a compelling picture of a transitional moment in English history, not to mention in the development of the English character."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Scotsman
   • content: "The Quality of Mercy is the work of one who is both artist and craftsman. There is not a page without interest, not a sentence that rings false. It is gripping and moving, a novel about justice which is worthy of that theme. In short, it is a tremendous achievement, as good as anything this great novelist has written."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Telegraph
    • content: "Unsworth's is a vigorous, clear-eyed approach to history, electrified by his complete feel for the period, his neat bathetic wit and his natural gift for storytelling."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 16, 2012
      Unsworth’s sequel to his 1992 Booker Prize–winning Sacred Hunger centers on a 1767 London court case resulting from the slave ship mutiny of the previous novel. Pretrial maneuvering, in-court manipulation, out-of-court negotiations, and post-trial reverberations are shown through the eyes of dedicated abolitionist Frederick Ashton; determined ship owner Erasmus Kemp; captured crew members who would say anything not to be hanged; and lawyers and underwriters who would do anything to protect their interests, along with even other perspectives. The action begins when the Irish fiddler Sullivan flees Newgate Prison, journeying north to the colliery village where a deceased shipmate’s family resides, including a coal miner father who dreams of working above ground and a seven-year-old preparing to work below. Kemp arrives in search of new commercial opportunities. Wryly, and with Austenesque delicacy, Unsworth presents the intricacies of love, competition, and other timeless human emotions, as well as 18th-century law (if slaves thrown overboard were already dying, the insurance company was not liable for lost property, etc.). Having invented his own brand of historical fiction, characterized by research, imagination, and a literate narrator equally adept at penetrating a society’s values or an individual’s heart, Unsworth creates a novel that works both as period piece and indictment of industrial capitalism. If this sequel lacks the freshness of its predecessor, it succeeds in presenting a compelling picture of a transitional moment in English history, not to mention in the development of the English character. Agent: Sheil Land Associates, U.K.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2012
      Unsworth returns to themes of greed and human rights in this potent sequel to his 1992 Booker Prize–winning novel Sacred Hunger. Set in 1767, two years after that epic novel on the British slave trade, this is a slimmer, somewhat less ambitious book. But it still has plenty of intellectual heft; Unsworth remains obsessed with exploring the rationalizations and conditional ethics that permit elites to abuse laborers. Erasmus Kemp, one of the lead characters of Sacred Hunger, returns here with two ambitions: to receive financial compensation from the slaves lost on his father's ship, and to acquire a coal mine that survives in part on the backs of child labor. Kemp is on the wrong side of history in both cases, but Unsworth doesn't apply the modern reader's moral certainties to his characters. For instance, Kemp's legal adversary is Frederick Ashton, an avowed abolitionist, but Ashton bristles at the notion of equality among races; he simply wants black slaves to be free to return to their homelands. A series of lighter subplots run under that main dispute. Sullivan, a crew member from the Kemp family's slave ship, escapes from prison and goes on a picaresque Grand Tour of England's underclass; Michael Bordon, born into a mining family, considers a way to acquire his family's freedom; and Kemp attempts to woo Ashton's sister, even though their politics diverge. Unsworth's knowledge of British history, from abolitionism to mining to courts and commerce, is assured and convincing, as is his ear for dialect; his characters' places on the class ladder become explicit whenever they speak. The novel's closing pages feel thinner as Unsworth ties together various plot threads, but the message about how much effort is required to effect social justice never feels didactic or unearned. A sturdy historical novel with fewer pages than Sacred Hunger but no less nuance.

      (COPYRIGHT (2012) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 1, 2012
      

      In 1753, the Liberty Merchant, a slave ship bound for Jamaica, tossed 83 Africans overboard on the pretext of illness and insufficient water available for them. In reality, the ship owner hoped for an insurance settlement for his loss of "property." Years later, this event becomes the subject of a court case in which the owner's son, set on avenging his father's lost fortune and eventual suicide, runs the mutinous crew to ground in the Florida Everglades and returns them to England for trial. In this pursuit, he is conflicted by a growing attachment to Jane Ashton, whose brother Frederick, an ardent abolitionist, is on the other side of this case, and he is equally distracted by his pending acquisition of a coal mine in which he plans to introduce new methods of efficiency for increased productivity and profits. VERDICT Recalling the Amistad and the song "Amazing Grace," Unsworth's (Land of Marvels) finely crafted plot brings together a vivid cast of seamen, miners, and landowners at a moment in history when crimes of property were considered more serious than crimes against persons and a more enlightened future lay just around the corner. Highly recommended.--Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from January 1, 2012
      Highly regarded historical novelist Unsworth's new novel is the long-awaited sequel to his Booker Prizewinning Sacred Hunger (1992). In that novel, we saw the sailors of a slave ship bound for the New World mutiny when some of the crew tossed live humans overboard, and the mutineers took refuge in Florida, where they lived for many years until they were tracked down by the ship owner's son and were brought to England for trial. The year now is 1767, and Unsworth, true to form, shows appreciation for the mind-sets and physical features of life in the past but, at the same time, supports his interest in commonly held societal ideas of the time as well as new ones surfacing in the law. Thematically, his new novel is about the downtrodden versus those in positions of overlordship; specifically, he draws our interest to a London courtroom as the mutineers from the previous novel are brought to trial, and, with ingenuity, he connects that situation to coal-mine activity in the north of England as emerging ideas of property and personal rights are played out in that dark, brutal world. The way this talented author elaborates the plot will ensure that readers will be eager to follow its challenging course.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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Barry Unsworth returns to the terrain of his Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger, this time following Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, son of a Liverpool slave ship owner who hanged himself. It is the spring of 1767, and to avenge his father's death, Erasmus Kemp has had the rebellious sailors of his father's ship, including Sullivan, brought back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy. But as the novel opens, a blithe Sullivan has escaped and is making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing as he goes and sleeping where he can.
His destination is Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell the family how Billy met his end.
In this village, Billy's sister, Nan, and her miner husband, James Bordon, live with their three sons, all destined to follow their father down the pit. The youngest, only seven, is enjoying his last summer aboveground.
Meanwhile, in...

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