Rating: 
Summary: A Depressing Read
Review: If you are suffering from some of life's tribulations at the moment, I suggest that you do not read this book. It is unrelentingly depressing. In following Cleasby and his inexorable slide from mere hero worship of Horatio Nelson to obsession and finally clinical madness, the reader is led down a very dark path indeed. If one word could be used to sum up this novel it would be: DISTURBING. The ending certainly shocked me, but on relection I realised that it shouldn't have. What happens is simply inevitable.Without a doubt Unsworth is an excellent writer. This was my first experience of him and, despite my view of this novel, his obvious talents as an author make me want to read more of his work. However, the bleakness of "Losing Nelson" made it impossible for me to enjoy and is my reasoning for giving it a two star rating.
Rating: 
Summary: A Book About Obsession
Review: In our celebrity-infatuated culture, this story is frighteningly appropriate. The reader is locked inside the mind of a man named Charles Cleasby who is obsessed with Horatio Nelson--believing him to be the greatest English hero--but who is slowly sinking into the realization that Nelson was far from the selfless, duty-bound public servant of popular mythology. As the obsessed do, Cleasby resists the knowledge that Nelson may have made some of his most important decisions based on political expediency or to aggrandize his own reputation. As other reviewers have pointed out, the ending is a let-down to an otherwise riveting psychological tale. There is a chance for the redemption of his character here that author Unsworth does not take, and which may have been more enlightening. Nevertheless, for those who have a knowledge of Nelson and his time, this book should be absorbing and entertaining.
Rating: 
Summary: A twin study of Horatio Nelson and Nelson obsession
Review: Losing Nelson is a brilliant book about a man trying to write a book about Horatio Nelson. The main character, Charles Cleasby, is a nebbish and a Nelson nerd, who, ever since beginning to specialize in Nelson on the recommendation of his psychiatrist, has no life beyond this obsession. He reenacts Nelson's battles, in real time and on their anniversaries, in a special room in his house; attends the Nelson Club, where he eventually gives a disastrous paper; and, most important, is trying to write a biography of Nelson. In it he hopes to prove his own firm conviction that Nelson was a perfect hero, a bright angel, who never did anything that was less than heroic, at least at sea. Cleasby is troubled by two things, one human and one historical. The human being is his typist, Miss Lily, who asks unsettling questions about Nelson's megalomania, his indifference to the sufferings of his men, his craving for celebrity; the other is a historical event, Nelson's apparent collusion in the betrayal of some Jacobin rebels in Naples, who left their fortresses under a promise of safe conduct but were arrested and executed. Cleasby hopes to "clear" Nelson of guilt in this case. His efforts to do this lead him further and further into the byways of his obsession, which, having started out looking like a hobby, becomes more and more a kind of derangement. Eventually he is drawn into the "poisonous flower-trap" of Naples himself, with surprising results. Unsworth is a fine historical novelist and one learns a lot about Nelson from reading this book; more interestingly one learns about the results on the fragile psyche of a Nelson fan (in his own mind, a double) of losing Nelson as a shining model of English perfection. Merritt Moseley
Rating:
Summary: An absorbing study of character, theme, and history.
Review: There have been a number of dramatic, descent-into-madness books in the past few years (McCabe's The Butcher Boy and Murr's The Boy, among them), but Losing Nelson is so much more sophisticated and so much broader in scope that I hope it will not be categorized with these other, more limited (though still fascinating!) books. It is a truly a remarkable novel, with a character so complete that one remembers him for much more than his obsession with Nelson and his descent into madness. Charles Cleasby, highly intelligent and very reclusive, believes that he and Adm. Nelson are the same person-- that he is, in fact, the dark side of Nelson. At the outset of the novel, Cleasby is trying to reconcile his abiding belief in Nelson's heroism with Nelson's behavior in 1798, when he aided the Bourbon rulers in Naples against the French and directly contributed to the outbreak of a civil war in Naples. Strong evidence suggests that Nelson has betrayed a truce and that he bears responsibility for the hangings of hundreds of Neapolitans. Unsworth so thoroughly incorporates the life of Nelson with the life of Cleasby that we feel Cleasby's confusion about his alter-ego Nelson and sympathize with his moral quandary about the Naples executions. The historical detail throughout is both fascinating and pertinent in showing parallels between the characters and in highlighting their differences. The movement of the narrative back and forth in time and location is seamless. Ultimately, Unsworth raises the larger questions of what constitutes a hero and why a nation even needs heroes, elevating this book to a significance of scope and universality that few novels ever achieve. This novel is utterly fascinating-- my favorite Unsworth novel to date.
Rating:
Summary: Deserves to become a modern classic.
Review: This absorbing novel works at two levels. At the most obvious it provides a quite chilling portrayal into an obsessive personality's accelerating retreat from reality, describing it with wit, insight and sympathy. Beyond this however it provides an extended meditation on the contradictions and conflicts associated with the gifts of genius and heroism. The subject of the protagonist's fixation is Horatio Nelson, whose biography he has been writing over many years. The crisis of the novel is brought about by his inability to reconcile Nelson's brilliance and inspired leadership as a naval commander with his pettiness ashore, with the crunch coming as regards Nelson's disputed, but probable, betrayal of his word as regards treatment of surrendered Neapolitan revolutionaries in 1799. The great strength of the novel is the way in which Nelson's career prior to and after this turning point is dealt with so rationally by the main character, and the reasoned way in which he deals with the adverse and pedestrian criticism of his hero by the prosaically-minded but kindly typist who is assisting him, thus throwing his inability to cope with the facts of Neapolitan episode into even sharper contrast. This is however only one of the many contrasts that dominate the story. Another is between the excitement and dash of Nelson's life afloat and the wretched biographer's claustrophobic existence in a modern England that has seldom been portrayed in terms more grey. Within Nelson's own life the contrasts continue, between his masterly grasp of the application of seapower at all its levels and the confusion and squalor of his private life and between the clarity of his judgement under extreme stress in battle and the pathetic vanity that dominates his behaviour ashore. Despite its sombre subject matter this novel abounds with quiet humour, which includes some rich self-parody, as with the frustrated biographer's indignation about the presence at a lecture of his of a "writer who had just published a long novel about the eighteenth century slave trade". In summary, a splendidly memorable and thought provoking novel, well up to the standard of Mr.Unsworth's "Sacred Hunger" and "Rage of the Vulture" and, like them, unflinching in its confrontation with the darkest aspects of the human spirit.
Rating: 
Summary: A fine voyage-but a sunken ending.
Review: This book is a wonderful compliment to Patrick O'Brian's sea chronicles. O'Brian's fans know that Jack Aubrey admires Nelson as his personal hero. This novel provides an excellent narrative of Nelson's life as seen through the eyes of a poor soul who cannot function in the 20th century. The book grabs your attention from the first page and is an excellent read; until the shocking ending. I found the ending to be contrived in a desperate attempt to make the book of interest to those who must have violence and mayhem in their video games, movies and books. I regret that Unsworth chose this path as the book was magnificient in its own right without the "mandatory" violent twist.
Rating:
Summary: Dark and disturbing
Review: This is a seriously grim and disturbing novel which is unrelenting in its descent to the inevitable. In my opinion there are no glimmers of hope, no redemption for the protagonist Charles Cleasby. The reader can do nothing but watch in horror at his Nelson Club humiliation, his gauche interaction with 'Miss Lily' and at the moment he finally realises the truth about his hero which leads ultimately to his final descent into complete madness. Despite all this if you can stomach the book it is well worth reading but I guarantee its content and especially the ending will stay with you for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: wonderful
Review: This is the first work I've read by Unsworth and it made me go out and buy two other earlier works by him. It a wonderful work which focuses on the psychology of obsession. At the same time it gives a great historical perspective on the life of Horatio Nelson. Unsworth creates memorable characters who the reader easily feels for. I found myself hoping charles would clear Nelson's name if only for his own psychological wellbeing. The ending however is shocking and may leave some with a bad taste in their mouth. But well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: I liked it very much
Review: This one is well-worth checking out. I'm a big fan of current 90's style best sellers like 'The Triumph and the Glory' and 'Hart's War', I appreciate their candour and gritty reality. 'Losing Nelson' takes second place to no other book in this regard, it is almost brutally honest. The storytelling is first-rate, the characters memorable, and the concept intriguing.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Year's Best Novels
Review: Unsworth is among those fine novelists whose work eschews the vulgar and commonplace -- each page is a finely burnished, exquisitely finished embodiment of the writer's art: Specific and sylish narration, clever illusion, apt metaphor and simile. In addition, Unsworth's oeuvre is marked by his high interest in moral choice, so not only does the reader get painstakenly polished descriptive prose, he also tabernacles closer to the true subject of the humanities -- i.e., in the exploration of the soul of man through man's acts. Losing Nelson recalls Unsworth's earlier novel, Sacred Hunger: Both books examine moral choice and are exquisitely executed, and both deal with British imperial history on the high seas. The first book is a riveting slave trade tale; the second (Losing Nelson), a clear debunking of British Admiral Horatio Nelson. Sacred Hunger is a much longer work and packs more narrative splendor with detailed descriptions of the ships, tools, climes, and smells. Losing Nelson more insistently plies the story's moral dimensions than Sacred Hunger does; indeed, Losing Nelson fairly begs the reader to continuously revisit and revise his opinion of the Admiral. All I know about Nelson I learned in this book (one learns a lot), and I am not really competent to judge Nelson. Even so, the book would have been better balanced, I think, had there been more positive revelations about Nelson. In sum, Losing Nelson seems rather too one-sidedly negative, perhaps too much of a debunking. Whence really did Nelson's bravery stem? Did his valor not derive from more than mere greed, vanity and lust? I also thought the Cleasby character was overly shallow and lazy -- one hoped he would at some point educe some new information to help redeem Nelson. I wish the author would write a book-length history of Nelson with illustations and maps and excerpts from letters and reports. He clearly has the information at hand, and besides, such a book would sell many more copies than a novel on Nelson, wouldn't it?
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