Sacred Hunger

Way back when (two years or so ago), a friend and I proposed to read the entire list of Booker winners. Yes! We would speak knowingly about these books above other books - we could truly consider ourselves cultured.

Printed list in hand, highlighter poised... I realised we hadn't heard of most of these books. And some of them sounded really, really boring. Still, we would persevere! (C'mon, deny that you've ever proposed a scheme like this, when your time is already so limited that sometimes you forget to breath properly or even blink, before you snigger.)

(These are all genuine side effects of stress. No jokes. How often do you find yourself yawning even when you're not tired? How often do your eyes seem dry, even without aircon to blame it on? Unless my doctor's having me on...)

This is how Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth ended up on my list of books to read. Now, this sounds like it's an excuse. Because it is. It's not a bad novel, but neither is it a great novel.

The novel follows a slave ship across the Slave Triangle - from Britain to Africa to the newly appropriated North America - juxtaposing this with the trials and tribulations of the ship owner's son. The intention is obvious: to represent the distance between the enterprise and the reality. A nail and hammer to kill a mosquito, but ok; slavery isn't exactly a topic for subtlety.

Some of the events described are brutal, so brutal, but again, we're distanced from them - the kind of distance (and reassurance) you get from watching a slasher movie. Again, intention resorting to a nail and hammer.

What I suspect the author intended was for us to identify with the protagonist, who is then implicated in the brutalities even in his sympathies, and so translate our own sense of implication. But the character is so consistent and his motivations so transparent that we anticipate even this.

The other characters range from this extreme to another: too consistent or too inconsistent (read malleable). Some of them intentionally draw on our sympathies and others revolt us. Then there is a scene featuring an animal that deliberately secures the allegiances of the characters and the reader.

Skip through a few hundred pages and the novel hurriedly nails together a mishmash of social philosophy, political philosophy, musings about the human condition, psychology and history, perhaps intended to throw the rest of the novel into relief.

Ta-da and a few pages later we have resolution and then it all ends.

Reading the novel feels like reading someone's confession. Whose? It is tempting to point to the author, but I feel uncomfortable brooding on someone else's thoughts, which then are my thoughts, and so on.

So perhaps this is the point: to feel as though you are reading a confession in which you are implicated but from which you are distanced. Can we be held responsible for someone else's mistakes? For society's mistakes? For all societies' mistakes? Where does this end?

Even mediocre novels tell us something about ourselves.