Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Unable to work on his novel about Liverpool's slave trade, Benson is teaching creative writing and wandering the city. The pupils who bring him their fantasies are a sad, dispossessed group with varying degrees of literary talent. Caught up in a series of bizarre events, Benson nevertheless finds his own imagination sparked by an encounter with two old army colleagues: Thompson, down-and-out and homeless; and Slater, a fabulously wealthy entrepreneur. In trying to heal old wounds, Benson unleashes a plan that just may blow up in his face. "There is a violent resolution to this obsessive and provocative novel that examines the abscesses and abysses beneath the violence of urban life and offers a quixotic personal answer." — The Times [London] "Fine descriptive writing and spirited humanity." — The Guardian Published for the first time in the United States Booker Prize-winning author of Sacred Hunger
Synopsis
A "powerfully done" (Times Literary Supplement) and tantalizingly semi-autobiographical novel from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger.
Norah Vincent
....[I]t is in its language that Sugar and Rum succeeds where other books failand in its ability to conjure up inner life — reminding the reader that at their bestwords can bridge the gap between the mind and the world outside it. —The Weekly Standard
Editorials
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
...Sugar and Rum is Barry Unsworth's 1988 novel, published here for the first time, about a 63-year-old writer in decline. Depressed, nearly manic, unable to work on his historical novel about the slave trade, Clive Benson roams the streets of a Liverpool also in decline, filled with ''abandoned projects, derelict enterprises, boarded-up ambitions"....Benson's...climactic venture into action, after his long apathy, is...doomed.— The New York Times Book Review
Marion Lignana Rosenberg
"My life seems to have lost all direction," remarks Clive Benson, the 60-ish novelist and protagonist of Barry Unsworth's 1990 Sugar and Rum. "I am not aware of any operation of the will, any progression. One minute I might be sitting down, the next I am standing or walking. There is no sense in my mind of an interval between those two states, no moment of purpose or decision."
Unsworth's book is a journey through the dark, claustrophobic places of depression, both personal and economic, as well as a dazzlingly ambitious work of fiction. Set in a Liverpool festering under the Thatcher regime, it conveys Benson's misadventures as he struggles with writer's block and ministers to his "fictioneers," the ragtag assortment of aspiring authors whose manuscripts he critiques to eke out a living.
The fictioneers' prose and Benson's glosses deliver consistent belly laughs, as when Sheila and Albert, the perennially frustrated lovers of Mr. Carter's opus, finally copulate: "She eased the implement of his power into the deepest fronded recess of her being." "There was a disturbing touch of the Black and Decker in the description of Albert's member," Benson muses. The varied fragments of student narrative, though, along with Benson's own scrapbooks and his unfinished novel on the Liverpool slave trade, also form a daring, sophisticated counterpoint to his restless meanderings through the city streets and alleys and his quest for "a thread, a pattern of meaning" in the "sickening welter" of words, memories and events on which he ruminates -- a quest that culminates in encounters with two fellow Second World War veterans of the harrowing Anzio campaign, one a homeless drunk, the other a pompous, socially ambitious leech.
It's an undertaking worthy of Italo Calvino in its dizzying layers of inter- and intratextual references. Though Unsworth lacks the Italian master's deftness, you can't help admiring his command of this intricate material and his graceful, evocative way with what his hero refers to as "the mildewed Logos": "Benson swept the glasses slowly through a world that was arbitrary and intense, disconnected, vivid green of the lawn, deep blue glow of the canvas, glittering sections of the lake, woods a depthless tangle of sunlight and leaf." Just as remarkable is the way that silence permeates this story of wordy undertakings and characters. Much of the dialogue is, in fact, monologue, either uttered by Benson to dazed vagrants during his nightly wanderings or exchanged by him with impossibly defensive interlocutors -- his students, for example, and the political zealot he is courting.
Readers will have to decide for themselves whether the novel's breathless, surreal conclusion amid riots and terrorism doesn't tie things up rather too neatly, and whether the continual winking at cultural icons -- a would-be muse named Alma, the Tolkienesque subdivisions "Signs and Portents," "Middle Passage" and "Reunions" -- isn't finally cloying. Still, Sugar and Rum is a rewarding meditation on literature, with its limits and consolations, and its shifting, elusive interplay with the obscure, disreputable places of the body politic and the human heart.
&151; Salon
Norah Vincent
....[I]t is in its language that Sugar and Rum succeeds where other books failand in its ability to conjure up inner life — reminding the reader that at their bestwords can bridge the gap between the mind and the world outside it. —The Weekly StandardLibrary Journal
Clive Benson, a noted historical novelist, has moved from London to Liverpool to research a book on the slave trade. But the project is hopelessly stalled, and Benson, divorced and in his sixties, is beginning to feel that this drab industrial city may be the end of the line for him. To supplement dwindling royalties from earlier books, Benson hires himself out as a literary consultant, offering editorial advice to a morose group of would-be novelists. Unsworth is himself the author of several well-received historical novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger (LJ 7/92), a novel about the Liverpool slave trade. Sugar and Rum is obviously partly autobiographical, and the first half of the book is a brilliant satire of the writing profession. In the second half, Unsworth attempts to use the slave trade as a metaphor for contemporary urban problems in Liverpool, with much less success. This interesting minor work by an important British novelist is noteworthy mainly as a supplement to Sacred Hunger. For larger fiction collections.--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Lynne Sharon Schwartz
...Sugar and Rum is Barry Unsworth's 1988 novel, published here for the first time, about a 63-year-old writer in decline. Depressed, nearly manic, unable to work on his historical novel about the slave trade, Clive Benson roams the streets of a Liverpool also in decline, filled with ''abandoned projects, derelict enterprises, boarded-up ambitions"....Benson's...climactic venture into action, after his long apathy, is...doomed.— The New York Times Book Review
Norah Vincent
....[I]t is in its language that Sugar and Rum succeeds where other books fail, and in its ability to conjure up inner life — reminding the reader that at their best, words can bridge the gap between the mind and the world outside it.— The Weekly Standard
Norah Vincent
[I]t is in its language that Sugar and Rum succeeds where other books fail, and in its ability to conjure up inner life—reminding the reader that at their best, words can bridge the gap between the mind and the world outside it.— The Weekly Standard