Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Unsworth, Barry - Richard Bernstein (review date 17 January 1996)

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Richard Bernstein (review date 17 January 1996)

SOURCE: "When Someone Zigs Instead of Zags," in New York Times Book Review, January 17, 1996, p. C16.

[In the following review, Bernstein praises Unsworth's "tightly constructed murder mystery" and the evocative details with which he builds his story in Morality Play.]

The first few sentences of this cunning, suspenseful medieval murder mystery by Barry Unsworth [Morality Play] are a model of literary compression and an illustration of the artfulness that adorns the novel's every page. With quick strokes of the pen, Mr. Unsworth introduces his narrator, Nicholas Barber, as a priest who in the recent past was searching for a meal but ended up in an act of adultery from which he had to make a quick escape. This, in turn, put him in the woods, rather than on the open road, and it was in the woods that he ran into a troupe of itinerant players standing mournfully over the corpse of a...

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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