The Quality of Mercy: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth Narrated by David Rintoul

Overview

Barry Unsworth returns to the terrain of his Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger, this time following Sullivan, the Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, son of a Liverpool slave ship owner who hanged himself. It is the spring of 1767, and 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 as he goes and sleeping where he can.

His destination is Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell the family how Billy met his end.

In this village, Billy's sister, Nan, and her miner husband, James Bordon, live with their three sons, all destined to follow their father down the pit. The youngest, only seven, is enjoying his last summer aboveground.

Meanwhile, in London, a passionate antislavery campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved in a second case relating to the lost ship. Erasmus Kemp wants compensation for the cargo of sick slaves who were thrown overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurers who dispute his claim. Despite their polarized views on slavery, Ashton's beautiful sister, Jane, encounters Erasmus Kemp and finds herself powerfully attracted to him.

Lord Spenton, who owns coal mines in East Durham, has extravagant habits and is pressed for money. When he applies to the Kemp merchant bank for a loan, Erasmus sees a business opportunity of the kind he has long been hoping for, a way of gaining entry into Britain's rapidly developing and highly profitable coal and steel industries. Thus he too makes his way north, to the very same village that Sullivan is heading for ...

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2012 - AudioFile

Amid the rising economic disparities of mid-eighteenth-century England, a vagrant Irish fiddler wanders to a northern mining village, and a wealthy industrialist demands legal restitution for the ruined slave ship on which the fiddler once sailed. This sophisticated novel explores the conflicting values of a rapidly evolving industrial society, and David Rintoul delivers the elaborately detailed narrative at a crisp pace. Rintoul provides restrained elegance for the aristocratic abolitionist who confronts the well-heeled ship merchants in court and employs a delicate touch with the colorful characters, including the poor mining families. During some of the ornate dialogue, Rintoul’s subtlety fails to differentiate the characters, but his reading is otherwise well suited to this urbane story. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Unsworth returns to themes of greed and human rights in this potent sequel to his 1992 Booker Prize–winning novel Sacred Hunger. Set in 1767, two years after that epic novel on the British slave trade, this is a slimmer, somewhat less ambitious book. But it still has plenty of intellectual heft; Unsworth remains obsessed with exploring the rationalizations and conditional ethics that permit elites to abuse laborers. Erasmus Kemp, one of the lead characters of Sacred Hunger, returns here with two ambitions: to receive financial compensation from the slaves lost on his father's ship, and to acquire a coal mine that survives in part on the backs of child labor. Kemp is on the wrong side of history in both cases, but Unsworth doesn't apply the modern reader's moral certainties to his characters. For instance, Kemp's legal adversary is Frederick Ashton, an avowed abolitionist, but Ashton bristles at the notion of equality among races; he simply wants black slaves to be free to return to their homelands. A series of lighter subplots run under that main dispute. Sullivan, a crew member from the Kemp family's slave ship, escapes from prison and goes on a picaresque Grand Tour of England's underclass; Michael Bordon, born into a mining family, considers a way to acquire his family's freedom; and Kemp attempts to woo Ashton's sister, even though their politics diverge. Unsworth's knowledge of British history, from abolitionism to mining to courts and commerce, is assured and convincing, as is his ear for dialect; his characters' places on the class ladder become explicit whenever they speak. The novel's closing pages feel thinner as Unsworth ties together various plot threads, but the message about how much effort is required to effect social justice never feels didactic or unearned. A sturdy historical novel with fewer pages than Sacred Hunger but no less nuance.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169521481
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	04/01/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

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