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'Losing Nelson' by Barry Unsworth

'Losing Nelson': Booker Prize winners deliver rewarding novels

Sunday, November 07, 1999

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

	Losing Nelson By Barry Unsworth Doubleday $23.95

The monument to Horatio Nelson, hero of Trafalgar, is a London landmark, towering over the square named for his naval victory against Napoleon in 1805, gaining England mastery of the seas but costing the admiral his life.

“England expects that every man will do his duty” is the best-known Nelsonism, an appeal to patriotism that served the British people well in a century’s worth of wars and conquests.

Great Britain’s century has passed. Today, its medals for heroism go to entertainers, and its international battles are fought on the charts of Billboard magazine.

So, to most, men like Nelson are anachronisms, but not to all. There’s Charles Cleasby, a middle-age Londoner who has devoted his lonely life to the admiral. Living alone with an adequate inheritance, he works endlessly on a Nelson biography and has slowly come to believe that he is the modern-day shadow of the admiral.

Cleasby is so deluded, in fact, that he plans his days around key moments in Nelson’s military career, including his death from a sniper’s bullet at Trafalgar.

Through Cleasby, Unsworth explores a handful of issues, from the current state of England to the nature of heroism. Much of the novel is lived inside Cleasby’s mind, a place where it’s difficult to tell whether it’s 1799 or 1999.

Unsworth is a hypnotic writer whose prose quietly snares the reader into a fully realized world. In “Sacred Hunger,” he created a temporary Eden in early 19th-century America.

In “Losing Nelson,” he re-creates the bloody fury of cannon-blasting sea battles with remarkable vividness, re-invigorating Nelson’s famous campaigns, which are all but forgotten in this “Star Wars” era.

Cleasby is there, maneuvering his ships’ models on a billiard table in imitation of the battles, to imagining himself at Nelson’s side amid the chaos when his fantasy is in full control.

Unsworth is in full control as well, maintaining the sad, pathetic and crippled voice of his “hero” throughout the novel, with never a false note. It is this consistency of tone that is so impressive a feat of imagination and writing skill.

At the heart of “Losing Nelson” is another battle, a fight between legend and the truth, which often gives a lie to the legend.

Are heroes to be forgiven for moments of human weakness?, Unsworth asks. Cleasby, who has committed his entire being to the heroic Nelson, finds the very foundation of his faith in jeopardy in facing that question.

He fears that his alter ego committed an act of cruel betrayal which cost hundreds of lives. It’s a complicated story stemming from Nelson’s role in recapturing Naples from French rule in 1799.

Also undercutting Cleasby’s hero-worship is his typist, Miss Lily, who constantly points out inconsistencies in Nelson’s character during dictation sessions in Cleasby’s home.

Lily is a 30ish single mother who twice a week brings the real world into Cleasby’s house, where a museum crammed with Nelson memorabilia is hidden behind a locked door in the basement.

She also puts a human face onto the idealized Nelson, casting moments in his life, including his somewhat bizarre personal behavior, in less Olympian lights.

And until she leaves for a new job, she also sparks within the isolated Cleasby the stirrings of human longing, stirrings he had long denied.

Cleasby -- a fragile soul who lost his mother in childhood, was humiliated by a cruel father and failed at college after a breakdown -- has retreated to England’s glorious past.

“They took hardship better in those days. They were tougher, more enduring. They didn’t expect to be cossetted the way people do now,” he says.

Page by page, Cleasby loses Nelson, finally facing a world without heroes or ideals, perhaps a world much like the one we inhabit today.

This is a wise, intricately wrought book which pushes Unsworth even further into the top rank of today’s novelists.