Morality Play. - book reviews

Christian Century, May 15, 1996 by Gordon Houser

By Barry Unsworth. Doubleday, 206 pp., $22.50.

Ron Hansen and Barry Unsworth both have made their marks with splendid works of historical fiction. Hansen's novels have explored the myths of the American West via the Dalton Gang (Desperadoes) and Jesse Janies (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), and examined mystical experience in an early 20th-century convent (Mariette in Ecstasy). Unsworth is best known for his Booker Prize-winning historical novel Sacred Hunger. In their new novels both writers change course by appropriating elements of the murder mystery into their fiction. Mysteries are most often read for the fun of trying to figure out "whodunit" or for the trying of suspense. But Hansen and Unsworth have a larger purpose.

Atticus is an extended presentation of the parable of the prodigal son. One character--Scott, the son--even comes right out and says so. And the book ends with a nearly direct quote from the Gospel of Luke: "And while his son was still a long way off, his father rushed out to greet him."

The novel has a contemporary setting, and it includes plenty of examples of waywardness--perhaps too many. Scott, the prodigal, is a 40-year-old artist living in Mexico, where he spends much of his time drinking and using drugs. On top of that, he is responsible for his mother's death. She was killed years earlier when the car Scott was driving while drunk skidded off the road. His father, Atticus Cody, still keeps the mangled Thunderbird, like a metal corpse, in his barn in Colorado.

One day Atticus gets a call from Renata, Scott's one-time girlfriend, saying that Scott has killed himself with the shotgun his older brother gave him for Christmas. Atticus flies to the Mexican village of Resurreccion (of course) and stays in Scott's house while he sets about the nasty business of viewing the faceless body and making arrangements for its transfer to the states. An astute observer, Atticus finds clues that suggest that Scott didn't commit suicide, but was murdered. Atticus does some detective work, putting together an array of information until he finds his answer.

This climax comes in the middle of the book. The latter half is told from Scott's perspective, and slowly reveals what really happened. Despite the complexity of the plot, this is not a plot-driven book. Hansen focuses instead on the intensity of a father's grief for his lost son and moves us by the fierceness of that father's love, which propels him toward discovering the truth about his son's life.

The author gives us numerous clues to how we are to interpret his characters. For example, Atticus meets a young man on the beach who knew Scott. When Atticus tells him he is Scott's father, the kid recognizes him: "You're the old man in that picture of his that he drew. My girlfriend thought you looked just like God." Later Scott recalls his father as one who "was never one of those not-in-my-house-you-don't fathers, there was only that calm, see-all, X-ray stare that told me This is not healthy and you know it."

Though our literature needs examples of human goodness, and though Hansen's intentions are admirable, his novel is not entirely successful. A major weakness is that Atticus, though ably fleshed out, is perhaps too good. His forgiveness comes too quickly, too automatically, and we've been set up to expect it. Indeed, Atticus often seems a bit too godlike to be convincing as a human being. The book's didacticism also sometimes mars the dialogue. Characters say things like, "Seems to me every one of you here oughta try living according to Bible values and see how that works out."

Barry Unsworth keeps to the historical genre, setting his book in 14th-century England. The narrator is a young priest, a Latin scholar who has left his bishop's employ after breaking his vow of chastity. Wandering through the wintry countryside, he comes across a troupe of traveling players and decides to join them. Unsworth tackles a less exalted theme than Hansen's, but he weaves provocative ideas about the purpose of fiction into this believable and suspenseful story.

Death is a player in this tale beginning with the opening sentence: "It was a death that began it all and another death that led us on." This pregnant sentence introduces three ideas that Unsworth plays with throughout the book: the omnipresence of death in this historical period (it wasn't hidden from sight or sanitized in that plague-ridden time); mystery as something not previously known but now revealed (this is St. Paul's sense of the Greek word "musterion"); and death as a motivator and definer of human actions.

As in a good mystery, the author provides hints of what is to come while maintaining the suspense. And though the plot is not terribly complex, it presents enough twists and turns to keep one reading. The final revelation is both surprising and satisfying.

An important theme of the novel has at least as much to do with "play" as with "morality." Unsworth shows how an imaginative work often serves to get at truth better than does so-called history. Nicholas, the narrator-priest, takes part in the troupe's performance in a small town where the company takes refuge. They learn that a boy has been killed there, and a mute-and-deaf girl is awaiting execution for the murder. Hunger is a pressing concern for the troupe, and Martin, its leader, gets the idea of performing a play based on the murder, since this is bound to attract a large audience.