Sacred Classic. Review on Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth

Perhaps but once in every two or three generations does an author of true literary genius emerge, one capable of producing works that merit the designation ''classic'', and which possess an enduring quality that will carry a book one hundred years into the future as desired, perhaps even required reading. Several weeks ago, I picked up a book by a British writer, Barry Unsworth, titled ''Losing Nelson'', a novel of a man obsessed with Admiral Nelson to the point of self-destructive compulsion. It was a fascinating, unsettling glimpse into the mind of a man slowly, inexorably retreating from sanity into a world of his own. Unsworth wrote on his own terms, with prose construction that transported the reader to places of interior vision unknown, new imaginations. The last book I read that instilled in me the same feeling of ''difference'' was Cormac McCarthy's ''All the Pretty Horses''.

Little did I know.

Being anxious to read other Unsworth books, I bought a copy of his ''Sacred Hunger'', published in 1992. The book, as it turns out, is a masterpiece, a tour de force, a book which, upon reading, might cause another author or aspiring writer to wonder ''Why continue? I can never even come close.'' -- a work of such articulated, evident skill that no one, after reading it, can ever again look at the craft of writing in the same way. On the surface the book is a tale of the British slave trade in the mid-1700's, an exciting, riveting, closely researched historical adventure. But the novel is, underneath, philosophical in conception, a graphic depiction of a society driven by greed -- the ''sacred hunger'' of the title -- and the animating desire to maximize profit regardless the human cost, its dark view relevant to our own time.

The two heroes of the book, Matthew Paris and Erasmus Kemp, are both tragically flawed, cousins destined from youth to be at odds with one another. In order to place himself in an exile he feels he deserves, Matthew agrees with Erasmus's father to sign on as surgeon aboard a newly built Kemp slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant. While Matthew endures the horrors of this ill-fated, ultimately mutinous voyage, his cousin in England enjoys the idyllic life of a young English gentleman, falling in love while rehearsing in an amateur production of Shakespeare's ''The Tempest''. Metaphorically, the tempest is fast approaching, and the ruin of the Kemp business sets Erasmus forth on a mission of revenge against the cousin he holds responsible.

This is a novel of scarred idealism and gray morality, immense -- it's 630 pages long -- and teeming with the scents and sounds of the 18th-century and life aboard a sailing ship. Unsworth's imagined world is palpable, at once comprehensive and unique, the depicted cruelty and hardship soul-shattering. His prose is elegant and precise, capturing perfectly, and with a fresh eye, the details that establish mood and character and fix it permanently in the mind. From the first page the reader is gripped by the evocative talent of the writer:

''She carried death for the cotton broker who owned her, or so at least his son believed. For Erasmus Kemp it was always to seem that the ship had killed his father, and the thought poisoned his memories. Grief works its own perversions and betrayals; the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body, and Erasmus could never afterwards escape the idea that his father had been scenting his own death that drab afternoon in the timber yard on the banks of the Mersey when, amid colours of mud and saffron, he had lowered himself rather awkwardly down to sniff at the newly cut sections of mast for his ship. Not odours of embalmment, nothing sacramental; the reek of his own death.''

And later, Unsworth describes Hell, not an imagined state of mind, not the Biblical purgatory, but a floating vessel in a calm, blue ocean:

''The sufferings of the negroes, already weakened by their privations and many of them with dysentery, were of the most appalling kind. Their rooms soon became insufferably hot. The confined air grew stifling through lack of oxygen and noxious with the breathing and sweating and excreting of so many bodies so close together. There was little more than two feet of headroom and the boards they lay on were of unplaned plank so that as they rolled helplessly in the hot, suffocating darkness, the rough surface of the wood took the skin from their backs and sides. In lapses of the wind Paris heard calls for help come from them, wild, demented cries. Sometimes he saw steam rise through the gratings.''

This is the writing of a man able to imagine the world he creates in such vivid detail he can place himself in it for purposes of then describing it in words to us -- the feel of the unplaned plank and its wear on the skin, the haunting imagery: ''...he saw steam rise through the gratings.''

Unsworth has written an intensely literary book that challenges our ideas of freedom, the nature of humankind and of suffering, and the evil that might reside in any of us. ''Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way.'' The novel's stately pace, like the scope of its meditations, accurately evokes an age. Tackling a central perversity of our history -- the keeping of slaves in a land where freedom was held sacrosanct -- Unsworth illuminates not only the barbarism of slavery, but the habits of politics and character that it creates. ''Sacred Hunger'' is an intricate, immense masterwork, disturbing and compelling -- and a damned exciting story, a classic that will take its place, in time, as one of the great novels of our age.