LOSING NELSON

This novel has every quality needed for a masterpiece, except one: action. Barry Unsworth--winner of the Booker Prize an for earlier work--is a highly skilled artificer. Christopher Kay can modulate his rich BBC voice to dramatize differences in sex or class. He narrates with as much passion as the prose will bear, but this is a model ship of a book. The protagonist, Charles Cleasby, is a solitary who's built his life around an imagined kinship with Admiral Lord Nelson. With miniature craft on a billiard table, Cleasby re-enacts each battle on the day and hour on which it was fought. He's writing a biography of his hero and has hired a typist. Miss Lily is single and thinks the great victor of Trafalgar highly overrated. Don't look for a sugary ending. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC/JAN 01]