Review: Sacred Hunger

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a terrific novel. It won the Booker – sharing it with the remarkable The English Patient – so it’s not as if I’m discovering it, but I hadn’t heard of it or Unsworth, so it feels a bit like a discovery after all.

There are two major parts to the novel – which is a minor [SPOILER:] – in its own right.

In the first, we get a split perspective. Erasmus Kemp is the son of a wealthy merchant who’s bet most of his capital on the new and burgeoning slave trade. His father builds and outfits a ship, The Liverpool Merchant, for that very purpose, and then sends it on its way.

At home, Erasmus spends his days trying to impress a young woman by taking part in a local production of a version of The Tempest. Unsworth is talented at showing him to be self-centered and entitled, and he paints Sarah as lively and proto-feminist. It’s a rich drawing room scenario with all sorts of Jane Austen-like details signaling the rise and fall of their courtship.

At the same time, of course, we know that the possibility of this marriage depends upon The Liverpool Merchant successfully obtaining a cargo full of slaves. Underneath the carefully drawn novel of manners – and presented in generally alternating chapters – is a horror that we come to see more fully over time.

Erasmus’s slightly older cousin, Matthew Paris, is part of the crew. A once idealistic physician who embraced a proto-Darwinism (there’s even a quick scene where, demoralized, he gives his materials to a young Darwin), he’s been virtually ruined. Imprisoned for impiety, he’s lost his practice and seen his wife die. So, with little more to lose, he asks his uncle to send him on the Africa trip.

It’s though Paris’s eyes, then, that we see most of the horrors of slavery. And, remarkably, Unsworth draws both sets of scenes with real skill. There’s a consistent feel to the narrative, but the tone obviously changes from scene to scene. While Erasmus is worried about how well he is delivering his lines, Paris is trying to figure out how to treat backs that have been torn open with a cat-o’-nine-tails and, eventually, fevers and dysentery that threaten the entire trip. While Erasmus worries over the subtle feelings of Sarah, Paris has to confront a Captain Thurso who increasingly channels a Captain Ahab like mania.

The back and forth adds to the power of each, subtly critiquing the way “gentility” depends on violence against others.

If that were all there was to the novel, I’d still have admired it. But, [MAJOR SPOILER ALERT:] there’s a second half that further complicates and complements the experience.

[PLEASE DON’T READ ON FOR THESE SPOILERS:] Eventually, Thurso pushes the crew too hard, and there’s a mutiny (or perhaps an accidental conflict that leads to mutiny). Paris and the others manage to get the survivors of the crew and cargo to a remote part of the Florida coast where they establish a utopian community where the would-be slaves live on equal terms with the sometimes shanghaied British sailors.

In the wake of the ship’s failure, Erasmus’s father has become a bankrupt and killed himself, ending Erasmus’s chance to marry Sarah. Some 15 years later, having married for money and become a major merchant in his own right, Erasmus sets out to find the renegade colony and bring them to “justice.”

There are some thrilling moments in the clash, but the larger matter – as is true of most novels I consider great – is the implicit conversation between conflicting world views. Each man feels in the right, feels as if he has witnessed great wrong, and it makes for a powerful coming together.

The very end shows us a glimpse of the future that Paris imagined, but – to be fair – we get an earlier glimpse in the opening pages when we meet Paris’s mixed-race son, a New Orleans character who can quote Alexander Pope and yet who knows the African-American experience first-hand.

As mixed as all that is, Unsworth never loses control of what he’s doing. I’m not prepared to say it’s better than The English Patient – that book is more ambitious artistically, and it achieves a yearning that few others accomplish – but, in turn, this one takes on perhaps a larger subject and certainly brings convincingly to life a broader range of characters.

I see that Unsworth, who died in 2012, has a long list of other books. I’m looking forward to exploring more of them.


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