Customer Reviews

Pascalis Island

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's not the mastery of language. Nor is it the precision with which Unsworth draws his characters. It is, rather, the skill, always evident in his work, with which he illuminates moral dilemnas that makes this book unforgettable. An intense foray into the mind and heart of am informer, this novel will touch all those who have ever wanted to tell their own story but felt unworthy. A very disturbing and moving work, like all of his other novels that I have read.

I don't know anything about the author, Barry Unsworth, but this is a masterful work of fiction. It reads like a classic. It's engaging and well thought through. reminded me of Hemingway by way of Camus.

I read this after vacationing in the Greek isles, and the book definitely opened my eyes to some of the more recent history that often gets over-looked in favor of the ancient.

In the end, you may not like Pascalli himself, but you will come to understand him and his motivations. And as unlikeable as he can be, you may even feel sorry for him in the end.

A well told story, and a quick read that I would recommend to almost anyone.

This novel is a clever time machine. It warps the reader back to 1908, a sun-drenched island, characters abuzz with intrigue, complex psychologies, morphing intentions behind a mirage of simple diction. The far-off sultan is the ever-present "Excellency," steadily sinking into the quicksand upholstery of his throne. The icky Izzet, both product and perpetrator of Ottoman despotism, gives one a clearer idea of just why the Balkans are such a mess today. Mahmoud Pasha, his bellicose boss, reminds one of a stuffed and cogitating mushroom. There is the suave and sordid Herr Gesing, whose tightly wound cravats and sharply cut suits reek not of lavender but of gunpowder and guts. The lithe Lydia traipses around her studio, draws mysterious money, seemingly from cyberspace, frolics on beaches, and gets herself into the briniest of pickles. Anthony Bowles is friendly but fey. One does not know whether to sympathize with his obsessions or to flee them as one would wildly metastasizing microbes. And the weird Pascali? On the paperback cover, he is pictured in suit coat and bowler, bobbing like a fishing lure in a murky sea, the sky spread out over him as a Levantine tent. This seems like a good place for him, since he spends the entire novel observing what is visible, most of him hidden in a kind of mushy and underwater world. The reader will not soon figure him out, and this is part of the galling genius of Unsworth's achievement. To inhabit his mind from first chapter to last, and still never grasp who he is? Pascali is like a remote and glittering planet: observable, fascinating, but always agreeably distant and aloof.

The novel is set on a small Greek island in 1908. The Ottoman Empire is about to fall, but in this remote outpost a government informer pens his last report to the Sultan. Basil Pascali, an outsider of mixed-race, has loyally reported on the activities of the people of his community for twenty years, each month receiving a tiny stipend, but never a single response. As a writer he begins to take liberties with his reports, taking enormous pride in his ability to depict events with great clarity and flair.

When Englishman Anthony Bowles arrives on the island, he and Pascali become rivals for the affection of Lydia, a Viennese artist who has been living there for some time. Pascali suspects that Bowles may not be honest about his claim to be an archeologist (it takes a practiced confidence-trickster to recognise another of his kind, after all), so what is he doing there?

The atmospheric short novel is superbly plotted, there isn't a scene out of place. Nothing is as it seems and Pascali's Island keeps you guessing right up to the tragic ending as the characters become enmeshed in layers betrayal and deceit.

Literary fiction honestly doesn't come much better than this and I am actually surprised that the novel didn't win more recognition at the time.

It was shortlisted for the Booker in 1980, but was eclipsed by William Golding's win for Darkness Visible and Anthony Burgess' masterpiece Earthly Powers. I've read several other novels by Unsworth which I've greatly enjoyed and admired (Morality Play, Rum and Sugar, Losing Nelson, and Sacred Hunger, which finally did won Unsworth the Booker) but I like this by far the best. (I still have his latest novel A Ruby in her Navel to be read.)

Pascali's Island reminded me of several other novels I've greatly enjoyed : E.M. Forster's Passage to India, L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, and the episode about the smugglers in Lermentov's A Hero of our Time ... all of them written much earlier.

(if set in a typical MMP format, this 192-page book wouldn't reach 100), the story is nonetheless boring. What little plot there is is beatifully summarized in Amazon's 'product Description' or in "mgerald" 's review.

Of course the author is a superb writer, and these days it's a pleasure and a treat just to read a correctly written story with no spelling mistakes.
For me however the tempo was too slow, and, more importantly, Unsworth chose for this narration an insufficiently interesting episode (this also happens in his "The Rage of the Vulture", while in "A Ruby in her Navel" the subject matter is surpassingly absorbing but the telling strangely lusterless), so that, for all of his skill, the end result is as vapid as the feel of the shimmering landscapes he describes again and again.

There's really very little more to be said: if you like style and don't mind an infantile plot, albeit laden with all the usual adult human bloodthirsty malice and avariciousness, buy the book. Otherwise, don't take the trouble to.