Tag Archives: Barry Unsworth

Life As Theater: Morality Play

12 Monday Oct 2020

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Review: Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth
Doubleday, 1995. 206 pp. $16

On a cold December day during the second half of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Barber steals upon a group of traveling players who stand away from a dying man, one of their number. Fascinated by the players’ wordless empathy, Nicholas watches too long, and they spot him and demand that he come forward. It’s a dangerous time in England, where the plague rides again, and suspicion and fear influence every interaction, not least with vagabonds.

But Nicholas is a vagabond himself, a priest who has left his diocese without permission. He has abandoned his good cloak in a house where he was committing adultery, and knows his way with a pair of dice in his hand. And when the actors move on toward Durham, where they are to perform Nativity plays for the lord’s court, Nicholas accompanies them.

He could have said that they’d just lost a man they need to replace. But Nicholas is also burning a bridge. The bishop of Lincoln, his patron, might take him back if he turned around right then and honestly repented his lapses. But appearing on stage violates the law. And though that scares him, Nicholas can’t resist — something about playing a part, belonging to the small, tightly knit troupe, has touched him.

However, the next village they happen on has recently witnessed a murder; a young boy has been killed, and a deaf-mute young woman sentenced to hang for it. Martin, the leader of the troupe, convinces the others to perform a play based on the killing, as it has been recounted in rumor and disputation around the village. To do so risks severe punishment, for, on stage as in life, truth comes only from God, and the players, already at society’s margin, will overstep if they pretend to interpret their world — and a profane event, no less. Nicholas, understanding the religious proscription intuitively, is appalled. But the show, as always, must go on.

Frontispiece to Wynkyn de Worde’s 1522 edition of the morality play Mundus et Infans (courtesy G. A. Lester, ed., Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, via Wikimedia Commons)

What a premise, as elegant as you could want. And what a title, literally evoking the medieval mystery play while figuratively showing the changeable nature of moral choices. Further, what the medieval mind called a mystery had to do with Scripture and God’s actions, ever inscrutable. But here we have that framework and an actual mystery alongside, which the performance of the play helps to solve.

I have read this novel several times over the past decade or two, and it remains among my favorites. Most people, if they’ve read Unsworth, will point to Sacred Hunger as his masterpiece, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet Morality Play has so much to say about the role that subsumes the player, not just the other way around, involving so many aspects of private, political, and social life, that I’m in awe.

Success here hinges on the characters, and you’d have to look hard and long before you found a more finely drawn ensemble, literally and figuratively. Besides Nicholas, whose desires outstrip his common sense (which makes him human), you have Martin, teacher, leader, and group conscience; Straw, the outwardly fragile, gifted mime; Stephen, the brooding drunk with a commanding presence; and others, each sustained in-depth without more than a line or two of backstory. Together, they create an amazing performance.

Then there’s Unsworth’s prose, simple, highly physical, conveying the time and place from the inside out. Among other things, the medieval theater comes to life in full panoply, as with a performance of the play of Adam, in which Nicholas changes roles between the Devil’s Fool and a normal one:

I shook my bells and struck the tambourine as I went back through the people. I was a different person now, they did not hate me. They knew me for a japer, not a demon. I understood then, as I passed through the people and shook my bells and saw them smile, what all players come to know very well, how quickly shifting are our loves and hates, how they depend on mocks and disguises. With a horned mask and a wooden trident I was their fear of hell fire. Two minutes later, still the same timorous creature as before, with a fool’s cap and a white mask, I was their hope of laughter. I was discovering also the danger of disguise for the player. A mask confers the terror of freedom, it is very easy to forget who you are. I felt it now, this slipping of the soul…

Morality Play is a work of genius, a mirror on human nature in the fourteenth century and now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book for my bookshelf, where it has pride of place.

Happy Birthday: This Blog Is Two Years Old

27 Thursday Oct 2016

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Once more, thank you for visiting. Whether you’re a regular reader or just dropping by, I’m glad you’ve come and hope you take away something that stays with you. You’re the reason I do this; without you, there’d be no point.

As I did last year, I’ll briefly recap my favorite books from the last twelve months. They belong to different genres within historical fiction, but from each I’ve taken away something that stays with me.

In no particular order, I particularly recommend these:

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave, tells a marvelously observed, wrenching tale of a love triangle during World War II. Think you’ve been there, done that? You haven’t, until you’ve read this one.

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth, explores Britain’s eighteenth-century slave trade to depict the human urge that puts profit before morality, decency, or empathy. So many novels have overdrawn, flat antagonists, but this book has two utterly real, compelling villains, one of many facets to this brilliant work of literature.

Stewart O’Nan’s thriller, City of Secrets, set in Jerusalem in 1945, portrays in elegant, tense economy the struggle to liberate Palestine, both against the British and among the Jewish organizations fighting them, with a political romance at the center.

Rush Oh!, Shirley Barrett’s delicate, lovely story about whaling in Australia around the turn of the twentieth century, surprises with its humor, compassion, and home truths about selflessness and its opposite.

Long Man, Amy Greene’s elegy for a dying town in 1936, tells how the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dam building raises issues of blood, land, and power. Greene’s rugged, potent prose and deceptively simple premise deliver a haunting novel.

You don’t have to like stories of wooden ships and iron men to appreciate Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, the first installment of the famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, O’Brian knows so much about the sea, it’s effortless, like breathing, but he shows the same touch with the English language and his main characters’ inner lives.

Andrea Molesini’s Not All Bastards Are From Vienna deals squarely with the First World War’s injustice, cruelty, and stupidity, yet is thoroughly engaging, thanks to the characters’ ingenuity, forcefulness, and mordant wit. They’re larger than life yet wholly plausible, the secret of great fiction.

Mary Renault’s classic, The Bull From the Sea, tells the story of Theseus, in such a way that the well-known myth becomes a deep, thought-provoking manifesto on the use of power and the virtue of forbearance. I wish our politicians were half as sensible.

Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark, the first of many volumes in another famous series, tells about an eighteenth-century iconoclast in Cornwall who tries to reform his life and lands–and then meets a young girl who’s an absolute firecracker.

In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes re-creates the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer who just manages to escape’s Stalin’s purges and often wonders whether he made the right choice. A riveting, darkly funny story.

Paul Goldberg, in The Yid, also revisits the Stalin years, supposing that the Great Leader was planning a second Holocaust in the 1950s, and that his antagonist is a former actor from the state Yiddish Theater. Fiction doesn’t get any bolder–or more absurdly real–than this.

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, and he deserved it. A riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale about the Vietnam War, told in flawless prose from the vantage point of a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, this novel skewers both sides and everyone connected with them. Superb.

Anything you particularly liked during the last year?

 

Remembering Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger

06 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth
Norton, 1993. 630 pp. $16

Four years ago almost to the day, Barry Unsworth died, my favorite contemporary author. The New York Times obituary called him “one of the foremost historical novelists in English,” an ungenerous epitaph if ever I’ve heard one. Like any literary master, Unsworth told powerful stories that expressed timeless themes through the actions of characters whom you’d swear lived and breathed. To qualify or diminish his accomplishment simply because history pricked his imagination more than present-day life is to miss the point of literature.

I’ve just finished Sacred Hunger, the sixth Unsworth novel I’ve read, and it’s sublime. The title refers to the urge to profit no matter what morality, decency, or human sympathy might dictate. The chief business here is the mideighteenth-century English slave trade, so the moral divide is very stark, but Unsworth takes that further. Not only does he replicate forms of slavery among people who have no direct connection to the trade, he shows how men and women can enslave themselves to ideas that cause them to inflict suffering on others. This is brilliant, and what’s more, it’s subtle–you see it without Unsworth having to tell you. It’s also unbearably tense, because every human transaction in Sacred Hunger carries tremendous risks, and for every mistake, someone will pay.

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Any novel exploring the nature of evil must have a compelling, fully realized villain, and Sacred Hunger has two. Saul Thurso, captain of the newly launched slave ship Liverpool Merchant, lets nothing and no one touch him. Even to look him in the eyes is an affront, which he suffers only from his employers or social betters. He tolerates no attempt to establish rapport, for in his view, there are only masters and servants, the one controlling the other through terror. If the underling objects, it’s only to grab what rightfully belongs to the master. So when Thurso whips a crew man senseless, he believes he’s acting to protect his employer’s profit and, therefore, his own.

Erasmus Kemp, son of the Liverpool Merchant’s owner, shares one trait of Thurso’s, the inability to befriend anyone. However, Kemp craves that more than anything; he just goes to great lengths to deny it, burying it under his tremendous drive to make himself rich and successful. He can banter with other men and be genial when he thinks there’s money to be made, but in pursuit of love, he’s too raw to admit what he wants. Early in the novel, he courts a young woman as if she were a valuable commodity, albeit one who fires his passion. Impressed with his ardor, she takes him seriously enough to see through him and attempt to soothe his ill nature, if he could tolerate that. But there’s the rub:

Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch–even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation.

Like Thurso, then, Kemp’s a prisoner of his own false dignity. Both act despicably, though I understand why, not to excuse them, but to recognize them as real.

Enter Matthew Paris, Kemp’s cousin. Kemp despises him, first, because he’s served a prison sentence, and, second, because Paris dares to hold his head up. But Kemp, Sr., takes pity on his nephew and allows him a berth on the Liverpool Merchant as a doctor. Since Paris’s crime was distributing pamphlets questioning the Creation, he’s a free thinker and loud about it, so you know he’ll run afoul of Thurso. Sure enough, he tries to tell the captain that when a slave refuses to eat, it’s because he’s humiliated and melancholy, not, as Thurso would have it, to deny his captors their profit. You can guess how that exchange goes.

You might also guess that, with the tensions between captain and crew, captain and officers, and the entire ship’s company versus their human cargo, this voyage will end differently from the way Kemp and Thurso have planned. But just how differently, and how that unfolds, I leave for you to discover.

I’m so sorry that Barry Unsworth left us.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, where it had remained, unread, for an unconscionably long time.