Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth [book review] #Bookerprize
It’s 210 years since an Act of Parliament abolished the slave trade in Britain, a trade upon which many personal fortunes were made; mansions, stately homes and churches built and Britain’s major ports, cities and canals developed. It’s estimated that by the early 1800s as many as one in six of the wealthiest Britons derived at least some of their fortunes from slavery. This is a period of British history which still causes controversy today – earlier this year campaigners vowed to erase the name of Edward Colston from the streets of Bristol because the buildings he bequeathed to the city were funded through his involvement in the slave trade.
The profit motive that propelled merchants and investors like Colston is the theme explored in Sacred Hunger, the 1992 Booker-prize winning novel by Barry Unsworth. It begins with the ambition of one man, William Kemp, a leading merchant in Liverpool who believes the time is ripe for the city and its entrepreneurs to reap the rewards of trade across the Atlantic and Africa. So confident is he that he has a new ship built to carry firearms to the west coast of Africa, intending to trade them for slaves to be transported and sold in the West Indies in exchange for a cargo of sugar to be taken back to England.
He knows it will be a risky endeavour. So he equips the Liverpool Merchant with special features: guns on its quarterdecks mounted so they can be trained down to quell slave revolts and thickened rails to make death leaps more difficult. In his captain Saul Thurso he finds a man who will not hesitate to act in whatever way necessary to maintain order. Yet Kemp likes to think he is also a caring man so he recruits his nephew Matthew Paris as ship’s doctor, “for reasons of humanity”, much to Thurso’s astonishment and disgust.
It’s through the eyes of this doctor that we witness events on board ship once it sets sail. Paris is a complex character. In between binding the wounds of crew members and treating the symptoms of venereal disease and bloody flux (severe dysentery), he spends his time at sea reading Voltaire and Pope. His thoughts turn constantly to his wife and his feelings of guilt for the part he played in her premature death. His objection to the profit motive, the inhumanity of slavery and the treatment of the human cargo put him at loggerheads with the Captain.
When an artist and philosopher called Deblanc joins the ship in West Africa, Paris finds he has someone with whom he can debate the legitimacy of the profit motive behind the voyage. Deblanc tells Paris how the lust for profit becomes legitimised:
Money is sacred as everyone knows… So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty.
Paris becomes increasingly disquiet about his own role in assisting the slave traders:
I have assisted in the suffering inflicted on these innocent people and in doing so joined the ranks of those that degrade the unoffending… We have taken everything from them and only for the sake of profit—that sacred hunger… which justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes.
Thurso decides to jettison the captured slaves, the insurance money being more attractive than their prospects for sale in their sickened condition. It’s the breaking point for Paris who leads a rebellion and forms a settlement off the coast of Florida where crew members and slaves live together on equal terms. They share the few remaining women slaves, communicate via a trade pidgin and trade with local Indians.
A decade later, William Kemp’s son Erasmus learns of this settlement and resolves to recapture the slaves for they are, in his eyes, his property. Book 2 of Sacred Hunger traces his journey across the Atlantic to seek retribution against his cousin, bring him to justice and reclaim the remaining slaves. Like his now-dead father, Erasmus is motivated by money and finds in Florida that the promise of land and wealth is equally compelling to the Governor of this British colony and the local Indian tribal chiefs.
The story moves at a smart pace, especially in the first book. There is a large and colourful cast of characters from the crewmen duped in wharfside brothels into joining the ship to Thurso whose glaring eyes and propensity for flogging make him an imposing figure. Unsworth provides so much detail that we feel we too are pitching and rolling through the waves or clambering up the mainmast. Fortunately the book doesn’t get so authentic that we experience the stink of the slave’s quarters in the bottom of the hull.
Sacred Hunger is long at 600 pages but doesn’t feel unnecessarily drawn out. It’s page after page of solid adventure, realistic 18th century dialogue and vivid prose which works without recourse to any experimentation with form. In Book 1 which takes us as far as Thurso’s murder of the slaves, Unsworth varies the tempo by alternating episodes on the Liverpool Merchant with scenes of a failed romance and a family scandal in Liverpool.
Book One was a joy to read but I wasn’t as enthralled by the considerably shorter Book 2. Most of this later section is set in Florida where the hoped for utopia of a settlement of equals is clearly breaking down despite Paris’ attempt to convince the settlers that “White man, black man, all free man, all bradder, lie tagedder dis place, all same boat.” The problem for me was that so much of this section is conveyed in that kind of pidgin language. It’s understandable since it brings home the point about how difficult it is for the English and Africans to communicate but it made for some frustrating reading. Overall though this was still a good read and will find a place in the top half of my favourite Booker titles I’m sure.
Footnotes
About the book: Sacred Hunger is a historical novel by Barry Unsworth first published in 1992 by Hamish Hamilton. It shared the Booker Prize that year with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (one of my all-time favourite Booker winners).
About the author: Barry Unsworth was born in 1930 in a mining village in Durham. After university he served in the Royal Corps of Signals, then became a teacher and novelist. He worked as a lecturer in English at a London technical college and the universities of Athens and Istanbul. He was writer in residence at the University of Liverpool. In later years he made his home in Umbria, Italy. He died in Perugia, at age 81, of lung cancer.
Why I read this book: Sacred Hunger is one of the remaining books on my Booker prize winners project. It’s also part of my 20booksofsummer2017 list.
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I don’t think this book would be for me. It sound very masculine, especially the sea travel. Perhaps this Nick calls to my mind Moby Dick meets slave trade?
Is it, or was it, common for the Booker prize to be shared?
Well it does have a lot of male characters
True, but it sounds like the plot focuses on high masculine endeavors. Men often engage in activities that aren’t clearly “DUDE.”
Other people might have different points of view but it wasn’t an issue for me. I don’t tend to read in a gendered way though
Of course! 😊
Unsworth is one of those writers whom I haven’t read and feel I should.
I enjoyed the link you posted to discussion about the slave trade and England, the compensation payment to the slave traders (but not, presumably to the slaves!!) – and particularly Bristol. This whole issue of wanting to revise our recording of history (naming of things, commemorative statues) is a fraught one and clearly has a way to go in our western democracies.
It’s becoming more common now with students at universities demanding various statues are removed and course material changed
Wow, I agree with course material being change to increase diversity, to add more voices (such as, here, more indigenous writers, more women) but you can go too far I suspect. We also need, particularly, in Universities, to listen to alternative views, if only to be able to argue against them?
Exactly – these people are at universities to help broaden their minds but some of the campaigners seem to have forgotten that. There was one uni where the law students said they shouldnt have reading lists with cases about rape because they were upsetting. I know its not pleasant reading but how far do you take this line of argument. Most of the law deals with unpleasant subjects in one way or another
What? If you are going to be a lawyer… Even if in the end you end up defending those lovely beings corporations… you have to study the lot, surely.
I would have thought so ….a bit like training to be a doctor but saying you don’t want to do any of those nasty dissections on corpses
Exactly!
Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this review of the book, Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth, as featured on the Booker Talk blog.
Many thanks for that Don
You’re welcome.
Funnily enough, your review reached my mailbox on the very day I was researching this book and deciding whether to buy a paper copy or download electronically (the main factors influencing my decision being its length, and the likelihood of my wanting to share the book with someone else).
Based on your review, I think this is going to be one-time read. And it is definitely long enough to warrant downloading.
Thanks!
It would be a fairly hefty book to have to carry around in paper format. I’m glad I read it that way though since I needed to look back a few times to check who was who in the crew
This sounds terrific, and I’ve got a copy of it! I’m enjoying this quest to finish your books:)
I bet it will take you a while to get to it though since you have so much in your TBR
What a great post! I did love this book when I finally got around to reading it, though I am not a fan of historical novels. And I agree with you about Part 1 being the best. Unsworth’s last book was a sequel to SH. I haven’t gotten around to it but it is much shorter!
Sent from my iPad
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I had things mixed up. I had the impression that Sugar and Spice was the sequel but in fact I see now that it comes before Sacred Hunger. The sequel to SH is Quality of Mercy which apparently looks at the trial of some of the seamen. The Guardian review makes it sound good. https://bookertalk.com/2017/08/30/sacred-hunger-by-barry-unsworth/
So glad you enjoyed this. I read it in my 20s at a time when I did not read literary fiction (I read a lot of genre fiction in those days) and I remember absolutely adoring it.
Did you feel the last section wasnt as good as the first?
I honestly can’t remember: it was 25 years ago!
I’ve never got around to reading this but perhaps I should try it, given your placement of it in the top half of your favourites. I’m not entirely in agreement with the expunging of the Colston name. Given that Bristol hasn’t been particularly good at owning up to its part in the slave trade, a better idea might be to have plaques around the city explaining the historical context of the various monuments and street names associated with it.
‘A Life in Books’, I’m with you on the Colston thing. We should not try to expunge history, but to understand it.
It’s the only way to learn from it.
Thats three of us then…
I’m not in favour of expunging the past – it’s the equivalent of airbrushing and pretending bad things didn’t happen. It’s the tactic of a despotic totalitarian society not a civilised one.
I agree. Better to face it, learn from it and ensure that future generations are aware, too.