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Sacred Hunger
by Barry Unsworth | Literature & Fiction
Registered by goatgrrl of New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Monday, June 14, 2004
Average 9 star rating by BookCrossing Members 

status (set by WormyOne): travelling


This book is in the wild! This Book is Currently in the Wild!

2 journalers for this copy...

Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Monday, June 14, 2004

This book has not been rated.

Purchased at a garage sale on the weekend for 25 cents -- I was delighted to find this, as it's one of the Booker Prize winners I've been looking for. 

Journal Entry 2 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Wednesday, April 27, 2005

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This is a staggeringly good book -- definitely destined for a spot on my list of "best books read this year". Sacred Hunger begins in 1752 with the construction of the slave ship Liverpool Merchant on the banks of the Mersey River in Liverpool. Owner William Kemp and his twenty-one year old son, Erasmus, are planning the ship's first voyage on the triangular route (England-Africa-America and back), hoping to recoup losses suffered in cotton speculation. The crew of the Liverpool Merchant consists of ship's captain Saul Thurso, first mate James Barton (a past acquaintance of Thurso's), second mate Simmonds, and bosun Haines. Barton and Haines are soon dispatched to capture additional crew members (a common practice of the day), and so are "hired" Billy Blair, a mentally handicapped man named Daniel Calley, Jim Deakin (sold into the captain's hands by a friend), the fiddler Michael Sullivan and a number of others.

To Captain Thurso's dismay, the crew are to be joined by William Kemp's nephew, Matthew Paris, as ship's surgeon. Paris has been recently released from Norwich Jail, where he served time for blasphemy -- "denying Holy Writ" -- after publishing a series of scientific tracts (his pre-Darwinian study of fossils as containing hints on the origin of life is an intriguing part of the story which -- unfortunately -- gets dropped as the novel proceeds). Following the death of his wife and unborn child, Paris has joined the ship's crew voluntarily as a kind of self-erasure, work on a slave ship being "as near to cancelling his former life as he felt he could come".

The ship leaves Liverpool in 1752, and Captain Thurso purchases nearly 200 slaves in West Africa in 1753. But the Liverpool Merchant never returns to England. We know from the first pages of the book that somehow, a descendant of one of those on board -- an "old plantation slave from Carolina" -- was alive on the streets of New Orleans in 1832. How did he get there, and what happened to him, and to those aboard the ship, in between?

Sacred Hunger was the co-winner of the 1992 Booker Prize, with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. There's a reading group guide (courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company) here, and a good review by Sheldon S. Kohn here. Readers may also be interested in visiting the online Transatlantic Slavery exhibit at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

(Picture: "Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes", from Images of African-American Slavery & Freedom, collection of the Library of Congress.) 

Journal Entry 3 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Monday, May 02, 2005

This book has not been rated.

Mailed to WormyOne in Brighton, England on May 3rd, since it was on her wishlist. I hope you'll enjoy this book as much as I did - I found I literally couldn't put it down! Best wishes from New Westminster, British Columbia. 

Journal Entry 4 by WormyOne from Brighton & Hove, East Sussex United Kingdom on Tuesday, June 14, 2005

This book has not been rated.

Thank you so much for an international RABCK. I love being able to cross books off my wish list. Looking forward to reading it. 

Journal Entry 5 by WormyOne from Brighton & Hove, East Sussex United Kingdom on Tuesday, June 20, 2006

9 out of 10

This book asks whether it is inherent in human nature to put personal commercial gain above decency to others. I found it powerful and yet very readable: I was quickly hooked by the characters and their stories. Of course, some characters are sympathetic and others not and yet they are all caught up, in one way or another, with the slave trade and none of them see this as immoral. At the time when the book was set (the mid-eighteenth century), the general attitude was simply that the slave trade was a rough but profitable business and Negroes were not regarded as being on a par with whites. So I found myself sympathising with someone’s situation and wanting the best for them and then remembering what the overall task was that they were engaged in and coming up with a jolt.

At times, I found the style of writing a little clunky. The language seems intended to be that of the eighteenth century but, sometimes the author explains something to the reader in the form “in these times, things were like this” which conflicts with an attempt to give the impression that the book is entirely within its time. The author also sometimes furnishes explanations to the reader through the device of a character needing it explained to them and I found this irritatingly transparent. For the first third of the book, I felt as though Matthew Paris had been placed on the slave ship almost entirely so he could play this role for the reader.

Overall though, I thought it was very well written. I liked the fact that I felt a juxtaposition between following the relatively trivial concerns of a few individuals (such as Erasmus’ love for Sarah, Matthew’s despair and the course of the boat on its voyage) and the knowledge that bestial cruelty and evil that was part of a horror on a massive scale was coming up. Slavery and competition between races is considered in many forms, including the African slave trade, the position of the crew of the slave ship (which is at best not much better than that of the slaves and sometimes worse), the subjugation/destruction of the Native Americans and even, to a lesser extent, the way in which a woman became a man’s property on marriage. 

Journal Entry 6 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Tuesday, June 20, 2006

This book has not been rated.

Great review, WormyOne! You took me right back into this book, which -- funnily enough -- I was just thinking about last night. Best wishes. 

Journal Entry 7 by WormyOne at Train station in Brighton & Hove, East Sussex United Kingdom on Thursday, June 29, 2006

This book has not been rated.

Released 5 yrs ago (6/30/2006 UTC) at Train station in Brighton & Hove, East Sussex United Kingdom

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

RELEASE NOTES:

On the seats nearest the ticket barrier on the concourse. 



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