The Northern Clemency [Hardcover]

Philip Hensher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2008

BOOKER SHORTLISTED 2008. An epic chronicle of the last 20 years of British life from the Booker shortlisted and Granta Best of Young British novelist, Philip Hensher. Beginning in 1974 and ending with the fading of Thatcher's government in 1996, 'The Northern Clemency' is Philip Hensher's epic portrait of an entire era, a novel concerned with the lives of ordinary people and history on the move. Set in Sheffield, it charts the relationship between two families: Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their three children; and their neighbours the Sellers family, newly arrived from London so that Bernie can pursue his job with the Electricity Board. The day the Sellers move in there is a crisis across the road: Malcolm Glover has left home, convinced his wife is having an affair. The consequences of this rupture will spread throughout the lives of both couples and their children, in particular 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of 15-year-old Sandra Sellers, childhood crises that will come to a head twenty years later. In the background, England is changing: from a manufacturing and industrial based economy into a new world of shops, restaurants and service industries, a shift particularly marked in the North with the miners' strike of 1984, which has a dramatic impact on both families. Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels, 'The Northern Clemency' shows Philip Hensher to be one of our greatest chroniclers of English life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Hensher is an anatomist of familial tensions and marshals his large cast of characters deftly. He has an impeccable eye for nuances of character and setting, and the details of Seventies food and decor are lovingly done: the mushroom vol-au-vents, the white wall units with brown smoked glass!an engaging and hugely impressive novel.' The Times 'The Northern Clemency - vast, compendious, wearing its ambition like an outsize boutonniere - makes a virtue of its exactness, its recapitulative zeal, its absolute determination to jam everything in and sit unshiftably on the lid.' Independent on Sunday 'Hensher has a forensic eye for detail, providing nightmarish glimpses of the everyday!engrossing, amusing and moving.' Independent 'An epic novel.' Guardian 'Hensher is fascinating good on how social transformation manifests itself in the textures, colours and manners of a culture!extremely funny, but also deeply humane.' The Sunday Times. A remarkable novel!Hensher's technique of shifting continually from voice to voice, the third-person narrative perceived from the viewpoint of each character in turn, gives a cumulative effect of luminous richness, like a perfect piece of orchestration!but there is something more than brilliant cleverness that makes this novel extraordinary.' Sunday Times 'Hensher's is a bold, impressively sustained attempt to mark a transitional phase in modern Englishness as seen largely from the domestic sphere.' TLS 'A beautifully written book!as impressive in its scope as in the effortless artistry of the language. Its characters are well--defined and plausible, while the narrative is leavened with deftly observed humour that gently pokes its lower--middle class protagonists in the ribs.' Scotland on Sunday The Northern Clemency is an immense novel which sweeps through 20 epochal years, showing us that a country can move rapidly into the future but that some individuals often remain shackled to the events of the past. In The Northern Clemency, an early contender for novel of the year, Philip Hensher looks in detail at a small group of people over a generation, and in doing so presents the great drama and inexhaustible wonder of ordinary life. Spectator 'The Northern Clemency is a terrific novel - a truly fine achievement.' Cressida Connolly, New Statesman 'As with most families, it's the small private moment that fascinate.' The London Paper 'Essential for anyone who wants to be ahead of the game by literary awards season.' Elle 'His saga of rather ordinary Sheffield families from the 1970s is strangely compelling. His characters are wonderfully drawn. There's an almost Proustian care in detailing (the curious dynamics of a party; the particular atmosphere of a municipal swimming pool). I loved it.' Charlotte Higgins, Guardian online The "state-of-the-nation" novel has made a return in recent years. This is the most interesting and accomplished of them that I've come across, precisely because it doesn't do the usual state-of-the-nation things. Hensher immaculately provides texture and atmosphere.' The Tablet 'An epic novel that spans 1974-1996. It's a laudable undertaking and Hensher is very good at describing a suburban 1970s childhood and adolescence.' Metro, Fiction of the Week 'An ambitious portrait of life in the north over three turbulent decades.' Observer 'Picks for 2008' 'Expansive yet precise, it leads the reader from the minutiae of family life to broad public events with the surest of hands.' Guardian 'Picks for 2008' 'Has the bones of a great British novel but, in practice, it is something more delicate -- a miniature made up of many moving parts, like an intricate piece of clockwork!What the book does very well is to capture individual scenes and a feeling of its time and place.' The Sunday Business Post 'Hensher has clearly been broadly influenced by Alan Hollinghurst's Man--Booker-winning The Line of Beauty but has written something distinctly his own. Combining his intelligence with a less expected humanity and storytelling drive, The Northern Clemency powerfully slices and preserves 20 years of British life and deserves to be remembered for at least that length of time.' Esquire 'In a pin--sharp portrait of Sheffield this reviewer knows well, Hensher charts the shifting fortunes of the Glovers and the Sellers as they negotiate the seismically changing decades of the late 20th century.' Daily Mail 'The big question: is this novel worth, at a minute a page, 12 hours of our time? I think it is.' Scotsman Praise for 'The Mulberry Empire': 'It's when he turns his pen to the more minute matters of the body and heart that Hensher changes from a merely clever writer into a moving one.' Ned Denny, Daily Mail 'Hensher is a publisher's dream. At last, he seems to have returned to the fictional territory of his earliest novel, trusting less to research than to his sharp wit, keen eye and love of London.' Patrick Gale, Independent 'Hensher is gifted with a great virtuosity and a relentless intelligence.' Ian Sansom, Guardian Praise for 'The Fit': 'A comedy of manners crammed with cleverness, warmth and genuinely funny jokes!Hensher is incapable of writing a dull sentence.' Daily Telegraph 'One of the funniest, most touching, most unexpected novels I've read for a long time.' Guardian 'In the best comic novel tradition, "The Fit" is also serious and touching!and like many of the best things in life it fell from a clear sky, and is all the more intriguing for that.' The Times 'A sharp novel, full of deft dialogue, ridiculous moments and enjoyable sallies.' Literary Review 'Playful, perceptive, and guaranteed to keep the reader's mind on its toes.' The Telegraph 'Genuinely beautiful.' The Spectator

About the Author

Philip Hensher is a columnist for The Independent, arts critic for The Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British novelist. He has written five novels, 'Other Lulus', 'Kitchen Venom' (Winner of the Somerset Maughn Award), 'Pleasured', the Booker-longlisted 'The Mulberry Empire' and 'The Fit', as well as a collection of short stories, 'The Bedroom of the Mister's House'. He lives in South London.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Fourth Estate (April 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007174799
• ISBN-13: 978-0007174799
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,164,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A phenomenal novel, May 27, 2008

By 

Nina (England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Northern Clemency (Hardcover)

A fascinating and absolutely rivetting novel.

I finished The Northern Clemency 4 weeks ago and have been letting it sink in. It is a wonderfully resonant novel, and the people and places still live within my head. It is, for want of a better word, a 'family saga', following the lives of two Sheffield families from the 1970s to today but it is also much more than that. It creates an entire world with a 'cast of dozens', with some marvellous cameo chapters devoted to secondary figures who make the world come alive. It is terribly emotionally involving; it made me weep twice, and this is _because_ of its sparse language that allows the reader to fill in the gaps. The book threw me in and tumbled me about, lulled me into complacency and then hurled something unexpected at me.

I loved the way we weave in and out of different people's consciousnesses, and i never quite knew where I was going to end up.

The prose in this novel is to die for. Some favourite images include the phrase ' She looked at him, sharpening a pencil in her head' and, 'He danced, moving from one foot to the other and making vague clay-shaping motions with his hands.' I hope this gives you a tiny idea of the wonderfully assured mastery of this author. I knew I was in good hands from page 1, and I wasn't let down.

I loved the build-up and the way people get mentioned on p.2 and then disappear from view until they unexpectedly reappear on p.64 in new, delightful combinations. I was entranced by the insight that suspense and surprise needn't come from the story itself but can come entirely from the plot, that is, from the way the story is presented. Unexpected revelations sneak up on you and give you delicious shivers of recognition.
I absolutely loved it. I only wish there were additional amazon stars to mete out because this deserves 7 of them. It is truly outstanding.

One of the best novels I have read ever. And I don't say this lightly. (I read a lot, and mostly so-called 'literary fiction'. To give you an idea of my taste: I love Jane Austen, Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy', Italo Calvino and David Mitchell.)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary tale of ordinary folk, August 29, 2009

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Northern Clemency (Paperback)

Philip Hensher's smoothly unspooling Man Booker nominated novel is mostly set in and around Sheffield, in the industrial North of England. Two families with young children live opposite one another in Rayfield Avenue, a mid-middle-class street of almost identical houses. Malcolm Glover, an insurance agent, and his wife Katherine have lived there for some time; the book opens with a party of Katherine's, in which we meet her three children (awkward teenager Daniel and his siblings Jane and Timothy) and many of the neighbors. The people in the house opposite are from London, and move in the next day. They are Bernie Sellers, who works in "the Electricity," his wife Alice, their sexually-precocious daughter Sandra, and their young son Francis. It is 1974. Over the next 300 pages, the action will move forward by no more than a few years, as Hensher explores the complex emotional and social webs binding these apparently unexceptional people. The last 400 will gradually move through the Thatcher years to end in the mid-nineties.

In some ways, this is an old-fashioned book, a family story simply told, that takes time to show its mostly-ordinary characters in depth. Other fairly recent but smaller examples are Penelope Lively's CONSEQUENCES or Kate Atkinson's BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM. But for this kind of large-scale lending-library novel, you really need to look further back yet, to RF Delderfield (e.g. GOD IS AN ENGLISHMAN), or fellow-Yorkshireman JB Priestley (THE GOOD COMPANIONS). For all its size, this is a book that will suck you in. It starts in what is almost afternoon-TV land, with snatches of vapid social gossip. But soon you become interested in some of the people talking or being talked about. Through one person you meet another and then another, in an effortless segue that might well go on for ever -- but now you want it to, because you have found you really care. Yet Hensher is not nearly so simplistic in his beautifully-written storytelling as you might think. Early on (as the jacket will tell you), Malcolm Glover will leave home, believing that Katherine is having an affair. Is she or isn't she? Within the next hundred pages or so, Katherine's relationship will be seen in many different lights, each adding something unexpected to deepen your understanding of her.

In the last half of the novel, as the clock jumps ahead, the book changes in three main ways. First, it becomes quite overtly political in its third quarter. Margaret Thatcher's campaign of privatization bring her into conflict with the miners, who come out in a mistimed, occasionally violent, and ultimately suicidal strike. This defeat clearly left scars on an entire class and region, but though Hensher writes with passion, this section may be harder to get into for those that do not know the background. A second change is that as the focus shifts to the younger generation, they leave home and set up on their own, a few still in the Sheffield region, but others moving to London or Sydney. Their characters fill out greatly in detail, but you miss the tight-knit unity of the Rayfield Avenue setting. It becomes clear, however, that several of the younger folks still carry traumas from their childhood which will resurface towards the end of the book.

The third change explains the book's title. Early on in the novel, Alice Sellers, who had been born in the North but moved to London as a child, is described facing the prospect of moving back: "She dreaded the North's forgiveness, the way it would look at her when she returned." That forgiveness, the Northern Clemency, will touch many of the characters before the book is over. Not all of them, and it never comes easily, but it is an act of grace whenever it occurs. Appropriately, the final words of the book are "...forgive him."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Less gormless than it seems, November 14, 2008

By 

Steve Benner "Stonegnome" (Lancaster, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Northern Clemency (Hardcover)

"The Northern Clemency" by Philip Hensher is an oddity, that's for sure. Following the doings (or, more accurately, non-doings) of a couple of families living in the suburbs of the North England (former) steel-making city of Sheffield from the early 1970s into the 1990s, it is presented almost as a stream of consciousness, hopping from person to person or family to family as it follows its own particular narrative threads from scene to scene. It is hard to really grasp just who (or what) is meant to be at the centre of this epic rambling tale. Perhaps it's not the characters or the places themselves, so much as the periods, especially the mid 70s and also the Maggie Thatcher years (especially the period of the Miners' Strike) which are quite effectively evoked, although sometimes a little out in the fine details.

The book is organised as just five chapters (or four and a half, if you take the author's numbering literally) which together span a massive 700-odd pages of narrative, with the action largely centred in Sheffield but also spilling out into London and, in the later pages, Sydney, Australia. Although born in London, Hensher himself spent his school and adolescent years in Sheffield at about the time portrayed in the first part of this book and it is easy to believe that some of this may indeed be semi-autobiographical. If so, one cannot help feeling that the author's memory is rather less than perfect, though, and also that the story is influenced as much by literary expedience as it is by actual experience. Parts of the tale are, if not wholly surreal, then nevertheless somewhat dream-like and much of it left me feeling very unsettled indeed. And while I recognised some aspects of the places and times in which I also grew up, there are also large chunks which are entirely unfamiliar to me and which I simply do not recognise at all. Or else are simply too stereotyped to be believable as anything other than cyphers.

Ultimately, I suspect, the book is about nothing so much as the ordinariness of everyday people (pointed up through the unstated but implicit observation that even "ordinary" people can have something quite extra-ordinary about them if only one looks carefully enough). And although nothing much really happens in this book (and some of the happenings are left frustratingly unresolved, or else simply fizzle out in unexpected and disappointing ways) it is easy to be drawn in and to be drawn along with the flow, simply to experience that flow, rather than out of any great desire to carried somewhere in particular.

Which, I suppose, makes it a lot like life itself.