Barry Unsworth, Writer of Historical Fiction, Dies at 81
Barry Unsworth, considered one of the foremost historical novelists in English, who was known for rich, densely textured fiction that conjured lost worlds — those of the Trojan War, medieval Europe and the Napoleonic age, among many others — died on Tuesday in Perugia, Italy. He was 81 and had lived in the Umbria region of Italy for many years. An Englishman, Mr. Unsworth won a Booker Prize in 1992 for “Sacred Hunger,” a story of avarice set amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 18th century. The award, now known as the Man Booker Prize, is considered Britain’s loftiest literary honor. (Mr. Unsworth shared it that year with Michael Ondaatje, who won for “The English Patient.”)
Writing about “Sacred Hunger” in The New York Times Book Review this year, the novelist John Vernon said: “The novel contains a vision of hell on earth unlike any in contemporary fiction, largely because its account of the unimaginable cruelties of the slave trade is told in the well-wrought prose of an old-fashioned 19th-century novel with an omniscient narrator. The effect is uncanny: its intelligent, controlled and immensely readable sentences glow with a deathly pallor.”
Mr. Unsworth’s books, characterized by prodigious research and propulsive narrative force, have long been renowned in Britain and have gained a broad international following in the last few decades. Among his best known — he wrote 17 novels in all — are “Stone Virgin” (1986), set in Renaissance Venice; “Losing Nelson” (1999), about a modern-day writer obsessed with the great British admiral; “The Songs of the Kings” (2003), which retells the story of the Trojan War; and, most recently, “The Quality of Mercy,” published last year, which continues the narrative of “Sacred Hunger.” Mr. Unsworth’s work was a prolonged study of morality. To him, as he made plain in interviews, the historical novel offered a wide portal through which to observe human ethical behavior and its myriad failings as played out across any imaginable era.
Writing about “Sacred Hunger” in The New York Times Book Review this year, the novelist John Vernon said: “The novel contains a vision of hell on earth unlike any in contemporary fiction, largely because its account of the unimaginable cruelties of the slave trade is told in the well-wrought prose of an old-fashioned 19th-century novel with an omniscient narrator. The effect is uncanny: its intelligent, controlled and immensely readable sentences glow with a deathly pallor.”
Mr. Unsworth’s books, characterized by prodigious research and propulsive narrative force, have long been renowned in Britain and have gained a broad international following in the last few decades. Among his best known — he wrote 17 novels in all — are “Stone Virgin” (1986), set in Renaissance Venice; “Losing Nelson” (1999), about a modern-day writer obsessed with the great British admiral; “The Songs of the Kings” (2003), which retells the story of the Trojan War; and, most recently, “The Quality of Mercy,” published last year, which continues the narrative of “Sacred Hunger.” Mr. Unsworth’s work was a prolonged study of morality. To him, as he made plain in interviews, the historical novel offered a wide portal through which to observe human ethical behavior and its myriad failings as played out across any imaginable era.
His books teem with greed. Displaying visible sympathy for people oppressed by those who lust for power, Mr. Unsworth ranged — sometimes soberly, sometimes humorously — over a catalog of human depredation, which also included kidnapping (remember Helen of Troy) and murder.
Reviewers occasionally chided Mr. Unsworth for appearing to fall victim to his own exhaustive research. “Facts sometimes arrive rather awkwardly,” the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian, in an otherwise favorable review of his 2009 novel, “Land of Marvels,” about intrigue in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I. Most critics, however, praised Mr. Unsworth’s stylish prose, rigorous fealty to detail and ability to evoke entire complex societies. As they also remarked, his books — with their evocation of mankind’s seemingly limitless capacity for immorality — were also brightly lighted windows onto our own age.
A coal miner’s son, Barry Forster Unsworth was born in Wingate, in the north of England, on Aug. 10, 1930. The first in his family to attend college, he earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester, where he studied English, in 1951...
