Who needs a hero? Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson

ABSTRACT Barry Unsworth’s novel Losing Nelson (1999) takes up the themes of heroic cultural heritage, the pitfalls of collective memory, and grief and loss. It is also a novel about the hazards of writing and re-presenting history. Unsworth has been primarily described as a historical novelist. In Losing Nelson he explores historiography as well as hero-worship, bringing them to the narrative as discursive practices. The protagonist of the novel, Charles Cleasby, is an avid admirer of Admiral Lord Nelson, and in the process of writing a new biography, the conclusive biography, as he hopes. However, he suffers from serious writer’s block, and his attempts to clarify facts about Nelson’s life and politics lead him into an even deeper personal and psychological crisis. Cleasby has devoted his whole life to the commemoration of Nelson. As the narrative progresses, it turns out that his hero-worship is fanatical, seriously damaging his ability of everyday social interactions. He lives the life of a recluse, only venturing out for meetings of the Nelson club and regularly re-enacting Nelson’s battles with model ships. Trying to shed light on Nelson’s role in the violent end of the Parthenopean Republic of Naples, Charles Cleasby finds that Nelson might not have been as perfect as he always took him to be. Cleasby’s fervent wish to exonerate the Admiral from blame even leads him to Naples, where he finds that Nelson is not commemorated, but seen as enemy and, potentially, as a war criminal. Instead, Francesco Caracciolo, one of the leaders of the Parthenopean Republic, is honoured. “There are no heroes out there, Mr Cleasby, there are only fears and dreams and the process of fabrication,” a local librarian tells Charles Cleasby. However, Cleasby is unable to shift his perspective, and his fanatic adoration of Nelson leads to the novel’s dark conclusion. Losing Nelson is concerned less with the critique of one individual, or the deconstruction of the Nelson myth. Rather, the novel explores conditions of heroisation processes, and the representation of the heroic within the framework of history writing. Together with the narrator’s reliability, the reliability of historical sources, questions of access to them, and the power and authority of interpretation are thrown into sharp relief. Losing Nelson inscribes itself as a text into discourses of the heroic which do not end with the novel’s ending. The very existence of the text points to the fact that the individual, social, and political impact of hero figures like Admiral Nelson provide opportunities for a cultural community to debate values and react to changes. In that sense, Unsworth engages in a highlighting and problematising process rather than in myth-deconstruction.