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About Barry Unsworth

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Synopsis

In the basement of a large Victorian house in London, Charles Cleasby painstakingly re-enacts the great sea battles of his hero, Horatio Nelson. He is also writing a faithful biography of the great man, as a true English hero for an age without idols, a 'bright angel' to Charles's dark shadow. But as Charles's visiting typist Miss Lily begins to question Nelson's heroism, and as Charles unearths evidence which tarnishes the image of his icon, his own precarious sense of identity is undermined and the battle raging inside him: between darkness and light, reality and fantasy, threatens to overwhelm him ...

Reviews

Customer Review: 11 September 2002

Reviewer: A reader from the Netherlands

This absorbing novel works at two levels. At the most obvious it provides a quite chilling portrayal into an obsessive personality's accelerating retreat from reality, describing it with wit, insight and sympathy. Beyond this however it provides an extended meditation on the contradictions and conflicts associated with the gifts of genius and heroism. The subject of the protagonist's fixation is Horatio Nelson, whose biography he has been writing over many years. The crisis of the novel is brought about by his inability to reconcile Nelson's brilliance and inspired leadership as a naval commander with his pettiness ashore, with the crunch coming as regards Nelson's disputed, but probable, betrayal of his word as regards treatment of surrendered Neapolitan revolutionaries in 1799. The great strength of the novel is the way in which Nelson's career prior to and after this turning point is dealt with so rationally by the main character, and the reasoned way in which he deals with the adverse and pedestrian criticism of his hero by the prosaically-minded but kindly typist who is assisting him, thus throwing his inability to cope with the facts of Neapolitan episode into even sharper contrast. This is however only one of the many contrasts that dominate the story. Another is between the excitement and dash of Nelson's life afloat and the wretched biographer's claustrophobic existence in a modern England that has seldom been portrayed in terms more grey. Within Nelson's own life the contrasts continue, between his masterly grasp of the application of seapower at all its levels and the confusion and squalor of his private life and between the clarity of his judgement under extreme stress in battle and the pathetic vanity that dominates his behaviour ashore. Despite its sombre subject matter this novel abounds with quiet humour, which includes some rich self-parody, as with the frustrated biographer's indignation about the presence at a lecture of his of a ""writer who had just published a long novel about the eighteenth century slave trade"". In summary, a splendidly memorable and thought provoking novel, well up to the standard of Mr.Unsworth's ""Sacred Hunger"" and ""Rage of the Vulture"" and, like them, unflinching in its confrontation with the darkest aspects of the human spirit.

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Critic Review:

Losing Nelson may be Unsworth's best book to date; it is accomplished, effective, exciting and intelligent...information is cunningly deployed, the pace is perfectly controlled: the mood of zealous desperation...is heightened from page to page.
The Sunday Times

This truly excellent novel delves deep into the tragic side of hero-worship and heroism, and is a work of pathos and power, ending with a dramatic denouement.
The Guardian

Ingenious...richly informative and sardonically entertaining' Sunday Times Books of the year. 'In spite of many moments of hilarity this is a serious novel about obsession, disillusionment and about faith and its loss. I know it will stay in my mind for a long time to come.
Daily Mail

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