Aim higher, reach further.

A Tribute to Barry Unsworth

When one of my literary heroes, Barry Unsworth, died on June 5, I felt as though I had lost a friend.

Although I had met Mr. Unsworth and heard him speak at the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, I had known him long before as a historical novelist who changed the way I thought about history and fiction. I want to use this space to express my admiration for him.

Mr. Unsworth, 81 years old, died (of lung cancer) the same day another literary giant, Ray Bradbury, died. Mr. Bradbury invented the future; Mr. Unsworth invented the past. In Key West, he told about writing "Morality Play," a novel set in 14th-century England, about a traveling troupe of players that put on Bible plays. When a new player joined the ensemble, Mr. Unsworth wrote, he had to learn the 30 hand movements all actors knew then as covert stage signals. After the publication of the book, a drama scholar wrote to Mr. Unsworth asking for his source on the hand-signal system. The source, Mr. Unsworth said, was his imagination.

Mr. Unsworth was born in 1930 to a family of miners in a small English village. His father had gone into the mines at the age of 12. In the ordinary course of events, Barry and his brother would have, too. But when Mr. Unsworth's father was 19, he emigrated to North America, and when he returned to England several years later, he went into the insurance business. "He rescued my brother and me from that long chain of continuity that happens in mining villages," Mr. Unsworth said. After graduating from the University of Manchester, Mr. Unsworth taught for several years before publishing his first novel in 1966; in the years since, he published 16 more.

His masterwork was "Sacred Hunger," a palace of wonders. On its surface, "Sacred Hunger" is about the 18th-century Atlantic slave trade, but his larger subject was the marketplace in humanity, and the willful blindness and barbarity of men who put profit above life. His most recent book, "The Quality of Mercy," is a sequel to "Sacred Hunger," and while it is smaller and less ambitious than its predecessor, it is a marvelous story told in Mr. Unsworth's typically polished prose.

My other favorites of his are "Land of Marvels," set in Mesopotamia in 1914; "The Songs of the Kings," which retells the ancient story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia as the Greek army prepared to attack Troy; and "Losing Nelson," about a biographer of the naval officer Lord Nelson learning that his hero was only human—or worse.

Barry Unsworth was a standard-bearer in the war against the superannuated contempt for historical novels, writes Cynthia Crossen. ENLARGE

What I most appreciated about Mr. Unsworth's work was that his research cast such a faint shadow on his narrative. He never seemed to be folding into his stories showy paragraphs of historical minutia. "I don't really care how many buttons someone had on his waistcoat," he said. "It would be good to get it right, but what really matters is trying to get hold of the spirit of the age, what it was like to be alive in that age, what it felt like to be…an ordinary person in the margins of history."

In a recent review of Hilary Mantel's dazzling historical novel "Bring Up the Bodies" in the New Yorker magazine, James Wood smacked down the form, calling it a "somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness." I can think of some great ones: "War and Peace," "The Scarlet Letter," "A Tale of Two Cities," "I, Claudius," "Lonesome Dove." I think of Mr. Unsworth as a standard-bearer in the war against the superannuated contempt for historical novels, science fiction, mysteries and thrillers that afflicts so much contemporary literary criticism.

"The term historical fiction is a blunt instrument in literary criticism," Mr. Unsworth said. "When people ask, 'Is it a good historical novel?' they may as well ask, 'Is it a good Protestant novel?' or 'Is it a good transvestite novel?' I write stories that are set in the past. Fiction set in the past should be judged by the same criteria as any other fiction. Does the novel convey a sense of life, touch the reader's mind and heart? Does it belong to what D.H. Lawrence called the one bright book of life?"

Show More Archives

Popular on WSJ

Editors’ Picks