Hawkstone Hall


Redemptorist International Pastoral Centre


… is not strained


The Quality of Mercy Barry Unsworth


HUTCHINSON, 304PP, £18.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £17.10 Tel 01420 592974


Three Month Renewal Course


Over 5,000 women and men in ministry worldwide have participated in this


programme, for many a life changing experience.


Spring Course - 12 Jan-22 March 2012 Summer Course - 23 April-19 July 2012 Autumn Course - 5 Sept-29 Nov 2012


5 Day Autumn Courses: Sunday pm-Friday pm


Leadership/The People of God in the Future


13-18 November Fr Selvaratnam OMI


Christ - An Unfi nished Portrait 20-25 November Fr Con Casey CSsR Retreats:


Advent Retreat


Waiting in Joyful Hope 2-5 December


Fr Maurice O’Mahony CSsR 2012:


Two Week Scripture School 22 Jan-3 Feb


Fr Ciaran O’Callaghan CSsR


Week 1: Major Theme: God’s Suffering Messiah: An Introduction to the Gospel of Mark. Minor Theme: Jesus’ Galilee


Week 2: Major Theme: Learning from Experience: An Introduction to Israel’s Later Writings. Minor Theme: God’s Love & Passion in the Song of Songs.


Holy Week Retreat


The Paschal Mystery 2-8 April


Fr Maurice O’Mahony CSsR & Sr Jackie Smith SP


Refl ective Weekends 2012:


Eucharist & Prayer 3-5 Feb


Fr M P O’Mahony CSsR


Painting & Prayer 24 – 26 Feb


Sr Jackie Smith SP


Christian Meditation 9 – 11 March Mr Leslie Glaze


Yoga & Prayer Retreat 15 – 17 June


Sr Carol Mouat OP


For further details of all courses, retreats and weekends, please contact: The Secretary, Hawkstone Hall,


Marchamley, Shrewsbury SY4 5LG, England Tel (+44) 01630 685242


Fax: (+44) 01630 685565 Email hawkhall@aol.com


Visit: www.hawkstone-hall.com 24 | THE TABLET | 12 November 2011 AUDIOBOOK REVIEW


Enlightened The Illumination Kevin Brockmeier Narrated by Graham Rowat


WHOLE STORY AUDIOBOOKS, £20.41


no reason anyone can discover, light begins to emanate from the wounded and afflicted bodily parts of people all over the world. The suffering of others thus becomes impossible to ignore. Gradually, however, it emerges that, apart from making it easier to sort the urgent from the non-urgent cases at A & E, the light doesn’t make much difference. The lives of the six characters the novel follows, upset by dead spouses and cruel fathers, remain desperately lonely. Linking the characters is a lost diary into which a woman has copied the love-notes


T


his novel begins with one simple, marvellously original idea. Suddenly, for


her husband writes her each day. Passing from one character to another, the diary becomes for each a precious emblem of the reality of love; as Nina, a middle-aged writer bereft of her fiancé, puts it: “If not ‘I love you’, at least somebody loved somebody.” One of the characters is the husband who wrote the notes; widowed, he learns from a self-harming teenager how to forget his sorrows in the thrill of cutting his own body. Two of the diary-bearers are endowed with the sort of supersensitivity that the light should, perhaps, bring to everybody. Chucky is a small boy who has selected muteness as a response to life’s terrors and for whom objects seem to sing out for love and understanding. Morse is almost dumb too: a homeless bookseller who can discern the suffering of people he doesn’t even know. Despite the sadness of its story and the discomfiting ambiguity of its ending, this is not a depressing novel. The characters are drawn with compassion and the light does seem to represent something mystical, hopeful, genuinely illuminating – if only one could know what it is. Julian Margaret Gibbs


B


arry Unsworth is on tremendous form in this sequel to his novel of slavery and


seafaring, Sacred Hunger, which won the 1992 Booker Prize. The new novel follows the fortunes of two characters from that book: Erasmus Kemp, troubled banker and entrepreneur; and Sullivan, fiddler and opportunist.


But where the earlier novel sprawled over time and oceans and continents, the sequel is as tight as a well-made legal case. From its fractured opening to its satisfying conclusion, this novel never falters, travelling easily between London and the north-east of England, eventually drawing its three main characters to a handball match in the tiny colliery village of Thorpe in Northumberland. Erasmus Kemp is at the centre of the


story, in the heart of the whirlwind of opinion and opportunity that is late- eighteenth-century London. He has just returned from Florida, bringing home seven sailors he hopes to see hanged for murder and piracy committed when the crew mutinied after their cargo of slaves were thrown overboard. Kemp’s desire for justice and revenge is confused when he falls in love with the sister of a prominent anti-slavery campaigner. The young woman, too, all emotion and compassion, is taken aback both by the power of her feelings for the


hard-nosed Kemp and by her ability to keep those feelings hidden from her brother. In direct contrast to the privileged world of wealth and politics is the life of Sullivan the fiddler who walks away from Newgate and the gallows with a group of visiting musicians. He sees his escape as a sign and heads north in order to fulfil his vow to a dead shipmate, stealing a few shillings from a drunk one minute and losing it all the next to a fairground tart. Sullivan’s good-hearted amorality is, in turn, set against the honesty – more pragmatic than deliberate – of three members of a mining family who dream of escape from the prison of life underground. Unsworth conjures up the mine, with its


hewers, putters, corve counters and child labourers, as effortlessly as he does the fireworks and water marvels of Vauxhall Gardens. Morality continues to fascinate him, and his characters often act as way-markers along the spectrum of human behaviour, from the brute who kidnaps a former slave to the young woman who seeks to alleviate the misery she sees everywhere. However, Unsworth is far too subtle a


thinker – and far too good a storyteller – to allow his characters to be mere markers. Even the belief that slaves are possessions first and people second – or not at all – Unsworth shows to be greedy and mistaken, rather than inherently evil. The novel is structured around two


riveting court cases and a land deal. One case is lost, the other won (in a narrow legal sense), and everyone profits from the land sale. In the end, however, it is not the nicety of the legal judgment, nor the outcome of the deal, but the clarity of the human heart that dictates the conclusion. Sarah Hayes


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