Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Unsworth, Barry - Michael Malone (review date 11 January 1981)

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Michael Malone (review date 11 January 1981)

SOURCE: "Other Times and Places," in New York Times Book Review, January 1, 1981, p. 10.

[In the following review, Malone provides an appreciative assessment of Unsworth's main character in The Idol Hunter.]

In 1908 on an irrelevant Greek island of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, the Levantine spy Basil Pascali writes his 216th irrelevant report to Constantinople, this time to the Sultan himself. Monthly, for 20 changeless years, the fat shabby informer has received for his services the same sum but never the slightest response to these millions of words poured into an Imperial void. In the silence he has written his life away and in so doing has fashioned it into the marvelous lapidary creation that constitutes British novelist Barry Unsworth's The Idol Hunter. Esthetic, solipsistic, constrained to see himself from the viewpoint of others as an obsequious, cowardly buffoon wretchedly...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Anatole Broyard (review date 9 October 1977)
   2. Michael Malone (review date 11 January 1981)
   3. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 7 February 1983)
   4. Thomas R. Edwards (review date 13 March 1983)
   5. John Clute (review date 16 August 1985)
   6. Katha Pollitt (review date 6 April 1986)
   7. Barry Unsworth with Phil Hogan (interview date 18 October 1992)
   8. Herbert Mitgang (review date 23 December 1992)
   9. Sybil S. Steinberg (review date 21 August 1995)
   10. Janet Burroway (review date 12 November 1995)
   11. Charles Nicholl (review date 12 November 1995)
   12. Adam Begley (review date 24 December 1995)
   13. Richard Bernstein (review date 17 January 1996)
   14. Anthony Quinn (review date 4 August 1996)
   15. Richard Eder (review date 9 March 1997)
   16. Hilary Mantel (review date 9 March 1997)
   17. Miranda Schwartz (review date 9 March 1997)
   18. Patricia Lothrop-Green (review date September 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright