The Quality of Mercy - Softcover

Unsworth, Barry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091937132 ISBN 13: 9780091937133

Publisher: Hutchinson, 2011

Synopsis

The Quality of Mercy opens in the spring of 1767, in the immediate aftermath of the events in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. It follows the fortunes of two central characters from that book: Sullivan, an Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, the son of a disgraced Liverpool slave-ship owner who hanged himself.

To avenge his father's death, Erasmus Kemp has had the rebellious sailors of his father's ship, including Sullivan, brought back to London to stand trial on charges of mutiny and piracy. But as the novel opens, a blithe Sullivan has escaped and is making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing and scamming as he goes.

His destination is the colliery village where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell the family how Billy met his end.

In this village, Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, live Billy's sister Nan and her miner husband, James Bordon. Their 3 sons are all destined to follow their father down the pit. The youngest, only 7, is enjoying his last summer above ground. The terrible conditions in which mineworkers laboured are vividly evoked, and Bordon has dreams of escaping the mine with his family.

Meanwhile in London a passionate anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved in a second case relating to the lost ship. Erasmus Kemp is claiming financial compensation for the cargo of sick slaves who were thrown overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurers who dispute his claim. Ashton triumphs in court, but not before his beautiful sister, Jane, has encountered Erasmus Kemp and found herself powerfully attracted to him despite their polarised views on slavery.

She discovers that Kemp wants to spend some of his sugar and slavery fortune on Britain's new industries: coal-mining and steel. A landowner father of a friend of Jane's tips him off about Lord Spenton's mines, for sale in East Durham, and Kemp sees the business opportunity he has been waiting for.

Thus he too makes his way north, to the very same village that Sullivan is heading for . . .

About this title

Review:

"Here, immediately, you know that you are in the hands of a master . . . There are several strands to the novel, interwoven with rare artistry and assurance . . . Barry Unsworth does all this. The Quality of Mercy is the work of one who is both artist and craftsman. There is not a page without interest, not a sentence that rings false. It is gripping and moving, a novel about justice which is worthy of that theme. In short, it is a tremendous achievement, as good as anything this great novelist has written." (Allan Massie Scotsman)

"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 . . . the fact that his characters never turn into moral ciphers is one of his greatest strengths. [The Quality of Mercy] has all these qualities in spades" (DJ Taylor Independent)

"The big theme is power . . . Unsworth's 18th-century setting finds a correspondingly 18th-century feel in the fabric of his story: it is deeply sentimental, at time robustly comic . . . a silkily written potboiler, wonderfully well-realised, entirely engrossing." (Sam Leith Financial Times)

"Has all its predecessor's power to shock. This novel is immediately involving and immensely readable and may even be better than the [Booker-winning] earlier book." (John Harding Daily Mail)

"This gripping novel . . . stands alone as yet another example of the author's extraordinary ability to turn dry history into dramatic narrative . . . With so much happening on the page that is dramatic and plot-based - the many different narrative threads eventually tie together in an entirely satisfying fashion - it could be easy to overlook the instances of quiet psychological transformation that give this novel its particular power." (Christopher Potter Sunday Times)

Book Description:

The stunning sequel to the 1992 Booker-winning Sacred Hunger

About this edition

• Publisher: Hutchinson
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0091937132
• ISBN 13: 9780091937133
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304