Book Review: The Quality Of Mercy

Book cover of The Quality of Mercy. Photo / Supplied

The Quality Of Mercy by Barry Unsworth
Hutchinson $37.99

What kind of historical novelist is Barry Unsworth? Despite his practised ear for the idioms of the mid-18th century drawing-room, and weather eye for the contents of the era's wardrobe, he is not a pasticheur.

And although the consciousness that lies at the heart of this series of dispatches from a 1760s courtroom is ultimately a contemporary one, neither is he the kind of post-modern trifler whose real aim is to remind his characters of the misfortune of having to inhabit a world before Freud.

In fact, he is a historical novelist of a reliably old-fashioned sort: the writer who offers a plausible recreation of a bygone age and animates it with people whose motivations are consistent with the tenor of their time, while noting that the past is never neutral and the behaviour of the men and women who wander about in it is there to be judged.

Unsworth's 16th novel, a rather tardy sequel to 1992's Sacred Hunger, has all these qualities in spades. Its Booker-winning predecessor tracked (at considerable length) the adventures of a slave ship's ground-down crew who mutinied off the American coast, made their way ashore into the Florida swamps and together with the surviving cargo established an egalitarian settlement built on the principle of inter-racial harmony.

Now, 14 years later, after their apprehension by Erasmus Kemp, the son of the vessel's disgraced owner, and his posse of redcoats, the boys are back in Blighty awaiting trial and a verdict Kemp hopes will appease a sensibility less interested in vindictive score-settling and more in a concept of justice that is almost abstract, the drawing of a line in "some cosmic ledger".

While Kemp's obsession is its driving force, the novel has several contending points of focus. Sullivan, the crew's Irish fiddler, has slipped out of Bridewell to make his way to the Tyneside colliery village inhabited by the family of his dead shipmate, Billy Blair.

By chance, Kemp's gaze is travelling in the same direction, as he seeks to better exploit local magnate Lord Stanton's coal stocks. Meanwhile, celebrated abolitionist Frederick Ashton is immersing himself in the three court cases which have a bearing on the plot: a compensation suit involving the "jettisoning of cargo" (that is, the slaves thrown over the side prior to the mutiny); the trial of the mutineers; and a test case primed to establish the freedom of former slaves now domiciled in England.

Kemp and Stanton are neatly juxtaposed: one a no-nonsense, upwardly mobile bourgeois who lives by plan and design; the other a genteel dilettante whose "easy paternalism" provokes Kemp's hostility, "not because he felt any great sympathy for the mining folk, but because it brought his own early struggles back to mind. He had had to scrabble for money, fight for his place in the world".

We know, of course - or think we know - what Unsworth wants us to feel about the world he has created, and the issues that run beneath it. At the same time, the fact that his characters never turn into moral ciphers is one of his greatest strengths.

- INDEPENDENT