Hero Worship

All historical novels--and plays and epic poems, for that matter--operate on the principle that the past dwells in some corner of Olympus, peopled with pre-lapsarian heroes and heroines. At the center of the garden, for better or for worse, stands the mighty tree, adorned with the magnetic fruit that inexorably draws them to their greatness and their doom. If we could only chew that magical pulp, the writer assures us, we might understand--or better yet, synthesize--that secret enzyme that nurtures his characters, that makes heroes of ordinary mortals. If we could only feel the nectar running down our chins, we might taste how great was that loss, how sharp was that division between time past and time present.

Barry Unsworth has proved himself a master of both the historical novel and the lost paradise. In his Booker Prize-winning “Sacred Hunger,” Unsworth wandered through a wild, utopian 18th century Florida where sailors and slaves dwelt in harmony. In his more recent “Morality Play,” Unsworth journeyed back to the 14th century in search of the seed of evil. Now, in his stunningly original “Losing Nelson,” Unsworth has found not only his perfect Adam but his perfect Milton.

Charles Cleasby, a 42-year-old amateur historian, is blind, not like the poet in the physiological way that disease darkens vision but in the simple way that obsession damages perspective. Charles’ grip on his sanity is tenuous and requires the re-creation of a personal Eden that promises to return him to the vigor of his youth, to the days before his mother abandoned his middle-class British family for the attractions of yoga and the mysteries of India, the days before his wits deserted him and forced him out of Cambridge University with a full-scale nervous breakdown.

His garden is England, the imperial England of the 18th century. The tree at its center is a 200-foot stone column, and the fruit on the tree is the greatest of all British heroes, the admiral who surveys all of London from his perch in Trafalgar Square, Horatio Nelson. For years, Charles has been writing a definitive biography of his hero. He so identifies with his subject that he measures his own days, his own calendar, by the timeline of Nelson, reenacting his great sea battles, from Cape St. Vincent to Trafalgar, with model ships on a large table in the basement of his home in London’s Belsize Park.

In fact, the novel opens on Valentine’s Day 1997, as Charles prepares his ships for “the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Horatio’s first great disobedience, the day he became an angel.” Here, at the very beginning of the book, the semaphore is clear: Our Adam, Horatio Nelson, owes his very heroism, his place among the angels, to disobedience, to “breaking the line,” disregarding the orders of his commander, eating the fruit and winning a great victory. Nelson is an angel of a darker variety, and Charles, his unwitting hagiographer, no ordinary Milton reciting a tale of “Paradise Lost” but Milton the Monster. Yet Charles is crucially unconscious of the satanic slant he has given his hero, the man after whom he has patterned every waking hour since his collegiate breakdown. After all, Nelson (or Horatio, as Charles calls him) lost his mother at the same young age as Charles lost his, was thrown as a 12-year-old boy into the turbulent waters of independence. Why look further for a model? “Horatio is your lifeline,” Penhas the psychiatrist counsels Charles. “Think of the mystery of the man, use him as a source of meditation.” And so Charles looks to Horatio as a beacon to guide him between the Scylla of his phobias and the Charybdis of the command, inherited from his very proper British father, never to show weakness.

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Nevertheless, Charles is stuck. His biography has run aground on the events of June 1799, when, according to all available material, Nelson abrogated a treaty in Naples and caused the arrest, torture and execution of hundreds of Italian rebels and their families. Not only Nelson’s reputation but also Charles’ own sanity rides on finding some unequivocal, hitherto undiscovered piece of evidence that might clear his name. His search is further hampered by the secretary he has hired to transcribe his dictation on a computer (for among his phobias is a terror of screens of all kinds). Miss Lilly, in the course of her work, troubles Charles by becoming his friend and Nelson’s sharpest critic. Far from seeing Nelson as a hero, Miss Lilly heaps common-sensical damnation upon his head, for Nelson’s vanity in victory and his lack of concern for the fears of his wife, culminating in his very public adultery with Lady Hamilton. But Nelson’s greatest crime in her eyes (the crime for which Dante damns the no-less-heroic Ulysses to the Inferno) is his leading so many men to their futile ends. “What was it for?” she asks Charles about one of Nelson’s marches into the valley of death. “If it had been to help someone. You know, rescue someone. Even a cat. But just dragging guns up a cliff. . . .”

Miss Lilly is only one of many pigeons Charles finds circling Nelson’s column. Driven finally to action, Charles embarks for Naples to find, in that crucial city, the vindication of Horatio. Yet, as he wanders the streets, he discovers a city that has turned its backside to Nelson. The streets and piazzas are named, not for the royalist victors of 1799 but for the rebels of the Castel dell’Ovo executed into martyrdom by Nelson’s treachery. History has moved on in the last 200 years. And to his horror, Charles finds it repeating itself, not even as farce, but as cartoon. In an exhibition in the Castel, he sees art masterpieces reconfigured with Disney characters: Minnie Mouse in Caravaggio’s “Lute Player” and the Happy Hippos in “The Arnolfini Betrothal.”

Like Mickey and Donald Duck, “heroes are fabricated in the national dream factory. Heroes are not people,” says yet another Nelsonian naysayer. “There are no heroes out there, Mr. Cleasby, there are only fears and dreams and the process of fabrication.” Faced with such a complete denial of his god, Charles chooses not Adam’s but Cain’s route back to the Edenic days before he and Nelson crossed paths, a choice at once brilliant and terrible.

But “Losing Nelson” is not just a book about one man’s descent into madness, about one man’s obsession with one hero. Nor is it just a book about England, a country that has lost an arm and an eye and still thinks it rules the waves. It is a historical novel about how we look at history, a strange and rich fruit planted by a superb creator, pulpy and juicy, full of wisdom and horror.