Losing Nelson - Hardcover

Barry Unsworth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385486529 ISBN 13: 9780385486521

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 1999

Synopsis

Barry Unsworth, author of the Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger and the bestselling Morality Play, has long established his genius for both historical narrative and for sharply observed, fantastically odd characters and stories. In Losing Nelson, Unsworth's most brilliantly imagined novel yet and a nominee for the Booker Prize, he has enlisted all these proven talents in a way unprecedented in his earlier work.

Every day, Charles Cleasby relives the events of Lord Horatio Nelson's life. He holds no regard for year-by-year chronology, so his life is a bustle of anniversaries: a political confrontation in 1797, for instance, might be followed immediately by a climactic sea battle in 1805. He reenacts the battles in his basement on a huge blue-glass table, moving the perfectly rendered ships that represent Nelson's Royal Navy and its enemies, thus reliving Nelson's triumphs.

Losing Nelson is a novel of obsession, the story of a man unable to see himself separately from the hero he mistakenly idolizes. Cleasby is, in fact, a Nelson biographer run amok. He is convinced that Nelson--Britain's greatest admiral, who finally defeated Napoleon, and lost his own life, in the Battle of Trafalgar--is the perfect hero, but in his research he has come upon an incident of horrifying brutality in Nelson's military career that simply stumps all attempts at glorification.

Admiral Nelson, faults and all, is a hero to many, but to Cleasby he is something more. Cleasby has come to think of himself as Nelson's dark side, the fallible human flip-side of the perfect man. And so Nelson's transgression represents more than just a chink in his thesis. Further, Cleasby's new assistant, Miss Lily of Avon Secretarial Services, insists on maintaining a running criticism of Nelson as she takes dictation, not to mention the objections she voices to the isolated, sheltered way Cleasby lives his life. Something has to give, and give it does--in the most astonishing and entertaining of ways.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Unsworth won the Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger; his next novel, Morality Play, was a Booker nominee and a bestseller in both the United States and Great Britain. His other novels include After Hannibal, The Hide, and Pascali's Island, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was made into a feature film. He lives in Umbria with his wife and recently held the position of Visiting Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

From the Back Cover

"Losing Nelson may be Barry Unsworth's best book to date; it is accomplished, effective, exciting and intelligent...Information is cunningly deployed, the pace perfectly controlled, the mood of zealous desperation, of exhilarated misery, is heightened from page to page."        
--The Sunday Times (London)

Sacred Hunger, winner of the Booker Prize:

"Wonderful and breathtaking...It is a book of grace and meditative elegance, and of great moral seriousness."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Utterly magnificent...By its last page you will be weeping."
--The Washington Post

Morality Play, a national bestseller, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a New York Times Notable Book:

"A book of subtlety, compassion, and skill, and it confirms Barry Unsworth's position as a master craftsman of contemporary British fiction."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A bravura performance...A thought-provoking comedy on the eternal sameness of disaster and the recurrent uses we put it to in art."
--The New York Times Book Review

After Hannibal:

"From its start as a deceptively simple, possibly amusing tale of a neighborhood squabble about a damaged wall, After Hannibal builds into a brilliant novel, exquisitely precise in its analysis of evil twisting its way through ordinary lives."
--Boston Globe

"A skillfully composed and beautifully written novel."
--Times Literary Supplement

Reviews

Unsworth (Sacred Hunger; Morality Play) delivers another memorable tour de force in this tense portrait of a London man obsessed with Britain's greatest naval hero, Lord Nelson. Charles Cleasby lives by the "Horatio calendar," reenacting Nelson's battles with model shops on a glass table in his basement. In his mind they are joined: Nelson is a radiant angel, a hero of unstained virtue, and he is Nelson's other, shadow side: "I was his heir, I had inherited his being." For years Cleasby has been writing a book extolling Nelson's heroism, but has become blocked over a controversial incident in June 1799, when Nelson apparently tricked two fortresses of Neapolitan rebels into surrendering, under promise of a safe conduct, then turned them over to their murderous Bourbon king and queen for hanging. Unsworth's control of his material, and his artistic ingenuity, his narrative skill in what is essentially a highly literate suspense novel, are supreme here. By compressing the milestones of one man's lifetime into the calendar of another man's year, he creates a shuffled chronology of historical events that parallels his narrator's wavering state of mind. Paragraph by paragraph, Cleasby's sense of self shifts and dissolves; in one paragraph he describes the view of Nelson's ship entering Naples harbor, in the next "we" are standing at its prow, and in the next it's "I" onto whose arm Lady Hamilton is swooning. Cleasby's erotic stirrings for Emma Hamilton and his misadventures with London's Nelson Club are the stuff of high comedy, and it's hard to say exactly why this novel seems so unsettling and suspenseful. Unsworth holds open a door to normalcy in Cleasby's growing attraction to Miss LilyAhired to transcribe his manuscript to a word processorAwhose down-to-earth and very contemporary responses put Nelson on a more human scale. The book's surprise ending, held back to the final page, seems therefore all the more cruelly ironicAand probably the nastiest twist of any in recent fiction. BOMC selection. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a novel of singular complexity, Unsworth (Sugar and Rum, p. 481, etc.) sheds remarkable light on the nature of obsession, as a daft but supremely knowledgeable biographer of British naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson fights desperately against the evidence to rescue his subject from a distinctly unheroic deed. Day by day, history is reenacted in the London basement of Charles Cleasby, as he celebrates all of Nelson's victories at sea on a glass-topped table filled with ships handcrafted to scale. Living alone and well-off after his father's death, Charles has no impediment to the lifelong pursuit of this celebration and its accompanying biography, save one: He cant explain to his satisfaction what happened in Naples on June 26, 1799, when his bright angel Horatio apparently defied a treaty and, using base deceit, sent hundreds of antimonarchist opponents, the flower of Naples society, to their deaths at the hands of their vengeful former ruler. Complicating matters for Charles is the fact that the secretary he's engaged to help with his book, a no-nonsense, kindhearted woman he nicknames Miss Lily and for whom he begins to have some feeling, is highly critical of Horatio's vanity and blood lust. After months of work on the manuscriptand an outing together with her teenage son to see Horatio's flagship Miss Lily reluctantly leaves for the summer on another job. The seeds of doubt shes sown in Charles's mind so tarnish his view of the man he's come to consider his shining twin, his other, that he feels compelled to go to Naples in search of evidence that will redeem them both. What he finds instead unites him with his hero in a manner that brooks no return. Psychodrama and historical suspense align to extraordinary effect here, entwining the two in a denouement both stunning and unspeakably sad. (Book-of-the-Month Club) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

With Nelson, Unsworth offers a new interpretation of "historical fiction" and clever commentary on the role of the hero in the national and personal psyche and the distorted world of those who live their lives through others. Charles Cleasby, a reclusive amateur historian, is obsessed with Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar. Cleasby is fascinated with every detail of his hero's life: myriad historical anniversaries, details of his personal life, and accounts of famous battles that Cleasby reenacts with ship models in his basement. In short, Cleasby is living vicariously through Nelson's life, his hero's exploits compensating for his mundane existence. To assert his divine image of Nelson, Cleasby is determined to disprove Nelson's involvement in a brutal massacre that makes him appear to Cleasby and others less George Washington and more Lieutenant Calley. The hero/antihero image of Nelson haunts Cleasby. The gentle nagging of his secretary and colleagues at the Nelson society fails to temper Cleasby's image of Nelson as Unsworth builds his story to a satisfying final climax. Ted Leventhal

Charles Cleasby is a reclusive scholar so obsessed with the British naval hero Horatio Nelson that he celebrates key events in the admiral's life as if they were religious holidays. Hopelessly stalled on his definitive biography of the decisive leader, Cleasby hires an assistant from a secretarial agency. This opinionated young woman offers a running criticism of Nelson as she takes dictation. Did he ever think about the young men he ordered to their deaths, did he share prize money with his crew, was it honorable and heroic to begin an adulterous affair with Emma Hamilton? Her skepticism so infects Cleasby that he fixates on one decidedly unheroic moment in Nelson's career, his murderous double-crossing of hundreds of Neapolitan rebels who na?vely surrendered to him. Though filled with factual detail about Nelson and his time, this cunningly bizarre novel is more a psychological thriller than a work of historical fiction. Booker Prize winner Unsworth is in complete control of his material, effortlessly sustaining an almost unbearable level of tension that is suddenly resolved in an unusually effective surprise ending. An exceptional performance; highly recommended.AEdward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I had a bad fright that morning. I wouldn't have left the house at all on such a special day if the man at Seldon's hadn't phoned to say they had a piece I might be interested in. It was an oval plate, bone china, frilled at the edges, slightly curved at the sides, pale cream in colour, with a central medallion enclosing his profile in dark blue. There was an inscription of the same colour in slightly worn cursive, running round the upper half of the medallion: Hero of the Nile. They had used the De Vaere profile made for Wedgwood in the summer of 1798. Nothing very remarkable about it. But of course I agreed to buy it. It bore his image. It was seldom indeed I could resist that.

I was on my way back home with it, back to Belsize Park. It was a raw day and the sky was darkly overcast. Nevertheless, I decided to walk as far as Knightsbridge for the sake of the exercise. I had time to spare--or so I thought.

As I was crossing Pont Street it started to rain, not very heavily. The platform in the Underground was crowded and became steadily more so while I waited. There was a silence among the people there, silence of waiting--they were resigned. I began to feel the first twinges of panic. Then an Asian voice on the loudspeaker: a delay on the line due to security checks at Gloucester Road station.

It was thirteen minutes to twelve. Imagine my feelings. This was February the fourteenth; it was the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Horatio's first great disobedience, the day he became an angel. On this day, at 12:50 p.m.--just over an hour's time--his ship, the Captain, went into close action. And here was I among this mute herd, sweating despite the cold, a good two miles from my table and my models. The ships were not even set out.

It mattered so much to get the time right, therein lay the whole meaning--how else could I keep my life parallel with his? Before my father died--he died last April--I fought out this battle wherever I could: on my bed, on the floor, one freezing day in the shed behind the house. We never missed, year after year we broke the line at ten minutes to one. Now I had the basement all to myself. The thought that I might fail the appointment now was unendurable, it made me feel sick.

There was no time to be lost. I struggled back to the surface along with numbers of others who had made the same decision. I was feeling distinctly unwell by now; my breath came with difficulty and there was the usual suffusion of blood at the temples, obscuring my vision, making me feel hemmed-in. It was still raining and there were no free taxis anywhere near the tube, nor outside Harrods. I had to walk some way towards Hyde Park Corner before I found one, and even then I was lucky; the previous fare was alighting as I came up.

I gave the address and sat back and concentrated on keeping my face composed and my breathing inaudible. Closing the eyes has always helped me to cope with anxiety, but now I waited two minutes by my watch before allowing myself the luxury. Timing is the key to control, and control is the key to concealment. The driver, if he glanced in his mirror, would think it strange if his passenger were dozing too soon.

My father was a master of concealment; he kept it up so well that nobody knew just when he died, nobody registered the precise moment.

We made it with twelve minutes to spare. I was still gasping a little as I went down to the basement. I did not allow myself to be sidetracked by considerations of where among the shelves and cabinets to put my new acquisition; such a decision would involve extensive rearrangement, it could easily have taken the whole afternoon, in these last months I had got steadily slower. I simply left the plate, still in its damp wrapping, on the floor and went straight through to my operations room and began setting out the ships, the Spanish first in their two loose groups, 9 in the van, 18 in the rear, these last headed by de Córdoba in his great flagship, the Santissima Trinidad, 4 decks, 136 guns, the most powerful wooden warship ever built. One of the first models I made; I was fourteen, home from school for the summer holidays. Odourless now, the ship in my hands, but still seeming to bear the spiritous, heady scents of its making--glue, paint, freshly cut shavings. The shed had a smell too, dust and hot creosote and the rank weeds that grew against the boards outside. Smells are more intense for solitude and remembered more intensely, as every lonely person knows. Sounds too. But I wasn't lonely, I had him.

Now for the English fleet, under Admiral Sir John Jervis in the Victory, Horatio's death-ship at Trafalgar eight years later--eight years, eight months, and one week. In contrast to the disorderly Spanish, our ships are sailing in impeccable close order, fifteen warships in perfect line-ahead formation, approaching from the south at right angles, making for the fatal gap in the enemy fleet, two feet wide on my table, roughly seven miles in actual fact.

The sight of them now, disposed for battle, gunports open and cannon run out, quite restored my calm. In full press of sail, with their flags and pennants and painted hulls, their figureheads picked out in gold and vermillion, they made a fine show. How much care and devotion I lavished on those models, those sloops and frigates and ships of the line, what pride I took in them. Before my father died I had to keep them in cardboard boxes in my bedroom, together with all the other Nelson memorabilia I had collected over the years. My room was full of boxes, you couldn't get the door more than half open, you had to edge your way in. Now my ships had for their manoeuvres the whole surface of the billiard table that had always been a feature of the basement. My brother Monty and I used to play on it sometimes, before he left. I had covered it with dark blue baize and had a sheet of glass fitted exactly over it. In the light of the lamp overhead--no daylight ever entered that room?the surface glinted like dark water and reflected the colours of the ships.

Eight minutes to go. Since first light these stately, deadly vessels have been slowly drawing closer together, approaching in a fashion apparently leisurely the thunder and carnage of a close encounter. Incongruous, and to me entirely fascinating, this dreamlike slowness. Consider the ferocious fire power of those ships, their capacity for destruction, more devastating than anything known before, on sea or land. Jervis is taking well over a thousand cannon into action with him. Now they are 25 miles west of the Portuguese headland of St. Vincent, 150 miles northwest of Cadiz, for which port the Spanish are running with a fair wind.

They would avoid the engagement if they could, but they cannot be allowed to, they must be intercepted. A heavy weight of responsibility lies on Jervis's shoulders today. The French Revolutionary War has reached a crucial phase. The Dutch fleet has joined with the French at Brest. One attempt to invade Ireland has already been made. Admiral Lord Bridport's Channel Fleet has been driven back to England by bad weather and forced to abandon the blockade of Brest. Only this same bad weather has so far prevented an enemy break-out and an unopposed Irish landing. If the Spanish are allowed to join them, the odds will become impossible. Not only have the English been forced to quit the Mediterranean--a vital sphere of influence--but the whole of continental Europe is now dominated by the armies of France. Drained by the subsidies she has been obliged to pay to keep her allies in the field, her trade routes curtailed, her merchantmen harassed by privateers, England is on the verge of bankruptcy. Ireland is simmering with rebellion. There are rumours of mutiny in the ships of the Royal Navy. It is indeed true, what Admiral Jervis is heard to remark as the weather brightens: "A victory is very essential to England at this moment."

Words that are remembered, recorded, famous words. But this brightening weather has revealed an awesome discrepancy in the strength of the opposing fleets. Jervis has fifteen sail of the line. Six of them are three-deckers, but only the Victory and the Britannia have as many as a hundred guns. All the rest, including Horatio's, are two-deck ships with seventy-four guns, the standard warship of the Royal Navy at that time. In addition Jervis has four frigates, faster than the line ships, essential for scouting and intelligence. I set them out now, on a diagonal, to windward of the English line. This is the force with which Jervis is proposing to engage the Spanish Grand Fleet, twenty-seven ships of the line, ten frigates, and a brig. Six of the Spanish three-deckers are carrying 112 guns, and there is the mighty Santissima Trinidad with 136. Altogether they have twice the fire power of the English. But there are compensating factors. The Spanish have put to sea in haste, they are undermanned, their officers are inexperienced.

Everything is in place. It is fourteen minutes to one. One hour and four minutes previously, while I was panicking at Knightsbridge, Jervis had given a bold and unconventional signal. On this occasion he cannot follow the rigid procedures laid down by the Admiralty in London for the conduct of sea battles, procedures that have not changed in a hundred years: You lay alongside, preserve strict in-line formation, and pound away in a duel of broadsides until the enemy is crippled or surrenders or runs. Jervis cannot do this because his force is too inferior; he would be overwhelmed. So he has given the order to put on press of sail and break through the gap in the enemy formation. It is the only tactic possible. Once through, the English fleet can attack to windward, concentrating its fire on the eighteen ships of the rear, disabling them before the van can make the turn into the wind and come to their aid.

A perfect day for sea fighting--calm, with a light breeze, no rolling to disturb the calculation of the gunners. I check that the English ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385486529
• ISBN 13: 9780385486521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352