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‘The Quality of Mercy’ by Barry Unsworth

BOOK REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 29, 2012|By Richard Eder

History is the vehicle for most of Barry Unsworth’s novels, but he never lets the vehicle preempt the passengers. It is for their sake that he provides it; to display and explore their complexities as if only in movement might a character’s concealing pleats unfurl. In “Losing Nelson,’’ the charting of the admiral’s battles serves to illuminate the wondrously kinky landscape of the hobbyist who charts them. In “The Songs of the Kings,’’ the Trojan War is a tragicomic ring for a circus of Greek dolts and schemers, as well as a beautifully inflected satire on our contemporary politics.

There is a lot of history and some shrewd contemporary allusions in “The Quality of Mercy,’’ a sequel of sorts, though briefer and more pungent, to the slave trading epic “Sacred Hunger,’’ written 19 years ago. It is not one but three stories, eventually converging; but through all of them it is not what the figures do - a lot - but who they are that holds us; particularly since they don’t stay fixed. In grammatical terms, Unsworth’s people go from indicative to subjunctive.

The central story belongs to Erasmus Kemp, a hard-driving merchant whose obsession for 12 years has been to avenge the bankruptcy and suicide of his father. The old man killed himself when the slave ship on which he’d staked his fortune was hijacked by its sailors and taken to Florida where they and the slaves set up a free farming commune. When the novel opens, Kemp has led a detachment of soldiers to capture the settlers and bring them back to England to be tried and hanged for mutiny.

The novel tells of the court fight put up by Frederick Ashton, an early abolitionist. He tries to get the case dismissed on evidence that the ship’s captain had thrown ill slaves overboard - Kemp argues it was simply a matter of “jettisoning cargo’’ - but fails. At the same time Kemp and Ashton’s high-spirited sister Jane fall in love despite their opposite moralities. This partly erodes Kemp’s assurance; so does his growing distaste for the slave trade; so does his shifting ambition to make a fortune by acquiring a coal mine in the north (it is the early days of the Industrial Revolution).

Kemp goes north to the coal town of Thorpe to conclude an agreement with the mine’s owner, the immensely rich and utterly frivolous Lord Spenton. Unsworth draws a sharply witty contrast between a lackadaisical but powerful nobility and the rising industrial class that will displace it. Meanwhile, a second story develops; the picaresque saga of Sullivan, a sailor-fiddler imprisoned with the other mutineers. (Fiddlers were employed on the slave ships so the manacled cargo would dance and keep a measure of strength; if they refused they were flogged.)