Style
Unsworth's style is not heaped in historical minutiae, "I don't really care how many buttons someone had on his waistcoat. It would be good to get it right, but what really matters is trying to get hold of the spirit of the age, what it was like to be alive in that age, what it felt like to be…an ordinary person in the margins of history."
In regards to writing and growing old, Unsworth said, "With time I have grown more sparing with the words. I think less of fire-works and flourishes. I try to get warmth and color through precision of language. This is more difficult, I think, which may be why I find writing novels so challenging and exacting."
Some critics have attacked historical fiction as being un-literary, for example James Wood writing in The New Yorker called it a "somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness." However Unsowrth defended the form, saying "The term historical fiction is a blunt instrument in literary criticism. When people ask, 'Is it a good historical novel?' they may as well ask, 'Is it a good Protestant novel?' or 'Is it a good transvestite novel?' I write stories that are set in the past. Fiction set in the past should be judged by the same criteria as any other fiction. Does the novel convey a sense of life, touch the reader's mind and heart? Does it belong to what D.H. Lawrence called the one bright book of life?"
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