Sacred Hunger Book

Historical novels are "a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness" according to James Wood in the New Yorker. (Where he is, however, exceeding polite to Ms Mantel.)

I can only imagine that this is one of those rarities whose existence he grudgingly allows. It is magnificent. It was magnificent the first time I read it all those years ago when it shared the Booker prize with The English Patient, and it retains its magnificence now.

A re-read is always a new experience: this time round I knew exactly where we were going so my attention was better directed on how we were getting there. The structure is an object lesson in plotting, with a breathtaking hiatus at the highest point of tension and strife on board the ship. The exquisite torture of what-happened-next is drawn out to the almost (but not quite) unbearable. Even more wondrous is the way that the whole action is entirely grounded in character, and not a single false note among those myriad lives.

But perhaps the most impressive aspect is how such a story of the appalling past can illuminate our oh so much more civilised present. As a moral tale of the depredations of greed - the sacred hunger of the title - it was first written in the immediate aftermath of the Thatcher years.
As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the Eighties without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences. (Quote taken from his obituary in The Independent)

How much more relevant now, as we see the fallout from another case of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences?

Mr Unsworth died just last month from lung cancer.