The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth

The Quality of Mercy

In 1992 Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger shared the Booker Prize with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. It was a miscarriage of literary justice.

Unsworth deserved to stand alone but it seemed somehow fitting that, even at his moment of triumph, this most accomplished but resolutely unshowy of novelists should find the limelight so grudging.

Some 20 years on and Unsworth has returned to his epic novel of slavery and revenge and written a sequel. Sacred Hunger closed with Erasmus Kemp, the son of a slave-ship owner, crossing the Atlantic to hunt down the crew and human cargo who mutinied and appropriated the Liverpool Merchant when slaves were thrown overboard alive to gain the insurance money.

In The Quality of Mercy it is 1767, the captured crew is back in England, in fetters and with the gallows looming.

The sacred hunger of the earlier book was for profit; here there are other hungers gnawing.

Kemp, cold and blinkered, is driven by the implacable desire for justice, while Frederick Ashton, a proselytising abolitionist, is fired by an equal but opposite sense of righteousness. For both men their cause is more important than any human damage that might result. And then there is Sullivan, a crew member who has escaped from prison and made a vow to get to a mining village near Durham and tell the family of a shipmate how the man died. The arc of these three quests points to a seemingly inevitable clash.

The story takes place in London and in the colliery settlement of Thorpe. Both are equally noisome; the former reeks of excrement, sweat and the fug of close-packed humanity and the latter with the tang of coal dust, damp and danger.

Unsworth excels in his evocations of each and of the moral world where slaves are merely goods "as bales of cotton might have been" and miners in their servitude are themselves slaves in all but name.

Having set up his narrative strands Unsworth then refuses to follow a simple path. When Kemp takes a financial stake in the very mine the escapee Sullivan is heading for and travels north himself it seems that only summary retribution - one way or another - can result; when the interests of Kemp and Ashton clash in court it seems either the rights of property or those of slaves as God's own creatures must prevail. Unsworth, however, is alive as few novelists are to the shifts and accommodations of human nature and these twist his characters in unexpected directions.

This is what might be called a Whig historical novel as the mercy of his title affects, to varying degrees, each of his protagonists. The result is a slight slippage in tension as the big denouement is replaced by smaller, subtler ones but not in interest because, as one character remarks: "The ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others is a great deal rarer than might be thought".

Unsworth, though, has it in spades.