Benson, who teaches creative writing, meets an old wartime comrade and memories of the war come flooding back. Somehow this sparks off a new awareness of his present life in Liverpool, in Thatcher's Britain. The author won the 1992 Booker Prize for "Sacred Hunger".
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The central situation--an aging, slightly dotty, blocked novelist going to seed amid the blight of late-Thatcher Liverpool--sounds irredeemably depressing, and yet by some narrative miracle Barry Unsworth makes Sugar and Rum a work of spirited playfulness, human sympathy, and quicksilver imagination. Clive Benson, hopelessly stuck in his historical novel about the horrors of Liverpool's slave trade, has taken to offering private instruction to a ragtag group of would-be writers he calls "the fictioneers." Prowling the shattered city streets in search of "signs, portents, auguries," Benson witnesses a suicide--a flashing leap from a high building--and soon after runs across an old wreck of an army buddy from World War II.
These encounters precipitate a crisis: Benson becomes obsessed with a traumatic wartime episode in which he inadvertently led a friend to his death, and then, stumbling from fantasy to action, he hatches a scheme to exact revenge on the arrogant second lieutenant they served under. As engrossingly bizarre as it is, plot in Sugar and Rum is secondary to narrative warp and woof--metaphor, allusion, surreal juxtapositions. A hypnotist neighbor appears to offer advice on getting rid of the owl that has invaded Benson's flat; a magazine featuring Dali and Verdi leads to the detested second lieutenant; the terrible legacy of the slave trade shadows every aspect of contemporary Liverpool.
Sugar and Rum is at once an inflamed political novel of class and race warfare, a satire of current social malaise, a portrait of the artist as a damaged but still plucky old man, a meditation on the meanings of performance, and a ripping good read. It is also an amusingly distorted autobiography, since Unsworth in real life succeeded in writing the slave-trade novel that defeats his alter ego--Sacred Hunger, which won the Booker Prize. It's quite a juggling act, but Unsworth proves himself more than equal to the task. --David Laskin --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Signs of the powerful writing Unsworth later exhibited in his Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger distinguish this otherwise unfocused novel published in England in 1988 and released here for the first time. On one level a stinging diatribe against the "inhuman system" of Thatcher's conservative policies, the narrative also deals with such themes as unresolved guilt, Britain's lucrative participation in the slave trade, and the tools of a writer's craft. Suffering from writer's block, 63-year-old historical novelist Clive Benson is unable to proceed with a new work set in Liverpool during the late 1700s, the heyday of the Atlantic slave traders. Alone since his wife left him, Benson has sunk deep into depression and alcoholism; he is so emotionally dislocated that he talks compulsively to strangers on park benches. To make ends meet, he has set himself up as a literary consultant, but his clients are largely untalented and impervious to advice. Examples of their execrable jottings are the one light note in a text otherwise dominated by dark images: a suicide in the book's opening pages, Benson's memories of the Anzio campaign during WW II, and the death of his best friend in ambush, an event for which Benson holds himself responsible. When he runs across another veteran of that conflict, who in turn leads him to the erstwhile platoon commander, now a fat cat enjoying a rich lifestyle, a series of coincidences and violent acts sweep the novel to a fiery if not entirely credible conclusion. Though some of the scenes in Liverpool's grim slums have a cinematic urgency, analogies between the 18th-century slavers and contemporary Thatcherite opportunists are strained. The story ends on an ironic note: Benson's emancipation from anomie is accomplished with the aid of some of his writing clientsAwhom he calls "fictioneers"Aan alliance of creative energy and social action that Unsworth seems to be calling for.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
By A.J.
Format:Paperback
"Sugar and Rum" is my first encounter with Barry Unsworth's work, and it's a nice surprise. It is tightly plotted and features a wide assortment of interesting and eccentric characters, but it is also somewhat dissonant and disturbing in the way it makes a crude, if well-meaning, statement about economic reform.
Clive Benson is a 63-year-old author who has had a semi-successful career writing historical novels, but now, stuck with writer's block while working on a novel about the Liverpool slave trade, makes money as a literary consultant for a group of aspiring writers he calls the "Fictioneers." His students include a grammatically challenged science fiction enthusiast, a rebellious biker girl writing lurid poetry, a quiet young man struggling to find a starting point for his autobiographical novel, and a woman writing a campy period romance.
Always looking for symbols in mundane events, Benson collects tabloid photographs and articles and wanders the streets of Liverpool striking up conversations with strangers. One person he comes across is an old World War II army buddy named Thompson, now a homeless bum, who sparks in Benson a memory of a personal tragedy in his past. Seeking answers about this incident, Benson tracks down his former platoon commander, Slater, who now is a wealthy financier married to a movie star and living in a country manor that happens to have been built by one of the Liverpool slave traders. Benson finds that Slater is essentially the same kind of domineering windbag he was in the army, nationalistically proud of England's history and aristocracy.
One of Benson's friends, a liberal, anti-Thatcher, activistic history professor named Alma Corrigan, inspires him to launch a juvenile revenge scheme against Slater, involving some of his impressionable and impulsive Fictioneers. The absurd denouement, however, is unsatisfactory for a novel like this that is attempting to make a serious political statement. The result of Benson's threadbare scheme does not change anything about British society or politics, does not strengthen the statement about economic reform that was already made clear throughout the novel, and is not even funny if that was its intention. The novel does not make it clear why a man of Benson's age, maturity, and relatively mild disposition would want to put such a plan into action; maybe his problem is that he can't tell where fiction stops and reality begins.
Despite the incongruous ending, I must admit that reading this novel was a pleasure because of Unsworth's richly descriptive prose and characterization. Unsworth has a keen sense for creating extraordinary characters with comical but believable idiosyncracies. The chauffeur who claims to be John Lennon's former bodyguard, the romance writer who indignantly refuses to have her stuffy characters impaled on spikes, the Verdi-loving Mrs. Slater who is in a constant alchoholic haze, and Rathbone the performing hypnotist are some of the best characters a reader could hope for. If only the book had an ending worthy of them...
Format:Paperback
This read and felt like an "in between" novel: it comes after the magnificent "Stone Virgin" and before "Sacred Hunger" (if you're not counting "The Rage of the Vulture"). When compared to both those works, it is second-rate stuff. There are pre-echoes of Sacred Hunger throughout with Benson's obsession with Liverpool's involvement in the slave trade. In many ways, it is an angry book: anger at the injustices caused by the decay of both the city of Liverpool and the lives of its inhabitants; anger at the way both Liverpool and Benson's ex-army colleague gained their wealth in the first place). It is, however, still very readable for all that, particularly if viewed in the context of the time it portrays - widespread political, economic and social disruption during the first Thatcher government, which manifested itself (at its worst) in riots in major British cities (such as Liverpool).
Format:Paperback
this a very good physcological novel. benson, the main character is sad but also quite funny, and his adventures carry you though efforlessly. crisp prose.
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