Search - Morality Play

I guess this book is intended to be deep, and have a cool setting and a mystery to boot, but I have to admit that I just didn't love it.

Certainly Unsworth is pointing at larger truths than just the surface level of the story: itinerant priest in 11th century England joins band of roving players as a means of hiding and gets caught up in a murder mystery. But the mystery is hinted at to loudly and too early, so it falls apart. And Unsworth never really explores his other themes in earnest, and the writing is only so-so.

As a historical novel it's ok, but there are better ones. As a mystery it's ok, but there are definately better ones. As a treatise on the nature of reality vs. the roles we play and the way we present ourselves to the world it really just doesn't dig deep enough.

Perhaps the problem is that Unsworth was trying to write too many books at the same time. It's not a bad book, it's just not a very good one either.

A serious but readable novel. In 14th century Yorkshire a runaway priest joins a troupe of players. Their "Play of Adam” doesn’t attract paying crowds so they make a recent local murder the focus of their drama. Their leader says, “It has been in my mind for years now that we can make plays from stories that happen in our lives. I believe this is the way that plays will be made in the times to come.” To which one actor, a breed not known for their wits, rejoins, "Who plays things that are done in the world? It was finished when it was done. How can men play a thing that is only done once? Where are the words for it?” The priests worries, “[I]f we make our own meanings, God will oblige us to answer our own questions, He will leave us in the void without the comfort of His Word.” While cobbling together bits of old plays and re-enacting the crime in rehearsals, the players realize that the murder could not have happened as the sheriff claimed and that the marginalized handicapped girl convicted of it and sentenced to hang is innocent. Even if the stuff about the birth of drama as an art form, the mystery story and a couple plot holes doesn’t impress, readers will like the evocation of plague-ridden, hungry, cold, and oppressed Yorkshire people at the time of the Hundred Years’ War. Unsworth makes the dialogue real not just by avoiding silly stuff like “forsooth” and “gadzooks” but conveying attitudes and assumptions of the time in the turns of phrase that the characters employ. Highly recommended.

OK, I’m admitting a big bias here. I’m a huge fan of Barry Unsworth, I love books set in the Middle Ages, am a sap for historical mysteries, and tend to seek out books about art and the creative process. And that’s all here in Morality Play, the story of a band of players who, upon arrival in a small village in 14th century England, decide to make a play based on the recent murder of a young boy from that village.

Each time I read this novel I notice something new. Unsworth is one of our master story tellers – he won the Booker for Sacred Hunger -- and he has a cunning way of setting his history novels in a past that feels true both to that past and to today. It’s no exaggeration for me to write that reading Unsworth got me back into reading novels, a practice I’d abandoned for several years.