Customer Reviews

The Northern Clemency

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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.)

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."

"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.

Is this just a superior soap opera? Malcolm and Katherine Glover live in a middle class suburb of Sheffield (it's 1974) with their teenage children Daniel and Jane, and 10 year old Tim. The story opens as a new family moves in opposite: the Sellers from London. Bernie Sellers has taken a job as manager of the local CEGB power plant. He's accompanied by his wife Alice, his bright but manipulative 14 year old daughter Sandra and his alexithymic son Francis, a little younger than Tim.

We follow the relationships within and between these couples and their children, augmented by a large supporting cast. The children grow up, the 1984/5 miners' strike is smashed, and we transition to the post-Thatcher services economy of the early 90s.

A novel which repays the time devoted to both writing and reading it has to illuminate, not just entertain. Hensher has beautiful insights into the complexities of relationships. The author has god-like powers to throw events and betrayals of trust at his characters, and Hensher is unflinching. There will be few readers of this novel who will not recognise aspects of themselves in his characters, and in their ways of managing and just coping.

I particularly liked the way the author used Australian culture (somewhat romanticised I fear) as a vantage point to illuminate English awkwardness and inhibition. I was less impressed with the way he treated the revolutionary left in the early 80s (The Spartacists). His `comrades' are uniformly unpleasant - spoiled brats with no basis in any kind of authentic idealism. His wonderfully nuanced character studies everywhere else in this novel might also have been extended to them. In particular, I don't think the character development and eventual fate of Tim fully carries conviction.

But these are small points. In summary, the novel's 738 pages effortlessly summon the reader to turn them, and it's easy to feel a part of the communities Hensher has made so real, and a privilege to briefly share their lives. I found myself thinking that Bernie Sellers would be about 70 now!

In the spirit of Ian McEwan-style metafiction, on the penultimate page, an older and wiser Daniel buys a copy of "The Northern Clemency" and soon becomes engrossed. He tells his wife "it's sort of about people like us." It surely is.

Philip Hensher tugs back the curtains of England's smug and manicured suburbia and gives us an extended peek into the cocooned lives of two lower middle-class families as intense social and economic change swirls unseen around them. Bernie Sellers has left a bland South London suburb and decanted his wife Alice, gangly son Francis and hormonal teenage daughter Sandra to a posh location on the edge of the Peak District in prosperous west Sheffield. On the other side of the road is the Glover family who are in the midst of a domestic crisis. Bored housewife Katherine Glover has taken a job in a florist's run by the odd Nick and quickly becomes infatuated much to the consternation of estate agent husband Malcolm. Meanwhile their spoilt offspring - snake-obsessed Tim, girl-obsessed Daniel and plain Jane - have the seeds of their disparate futures unexpectedly sown. We then follow the Glovers and the Sellers - and others - over three decades of rapidly changing English social history.
The Northern Clemency is a conventional novel about a conventional subject. It is very long and incredibly detailed on the minutiae of the daily lives of ordinary people during the last quarter of the twentieth century. If anything, there is too much detail. For example, when we learn of Malcolm Glover's passion for the English Civil War we don't really need to join him on the Moors for a juvenile recreation of the Battle of Naseby, and there are other gratuitous sections which serve no obvious role in the plot. The author is plainly very comfortable within his suburban milieu but he, and his characters, are less convincing when stepping into the wider world, notably industrial east Sheffield, though it would be nigh on impossible to produce a work about 1980s Sheffield without at least a passing reference to the miners' strike which first exploded there. In the end, though, this novel is less about historical events and more about families and how they cope with the rollercoaster of life along a bumpy road of conflicting ideals, ambitions and motivations, and the inevitable secrets, suspicions and misunderstandings that arise when different sexes and generations pass their lives under the same roof. Little lives on a grand scale, generally interesting, often fun and occasionally gripping, but not to be taken too seriously.

"Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth century Russian novels," it says on the cover blurb. Well, I can't say whether or not `The Northern Clemency' lives up to this expectation because I haven't read much Russian literature, nineteenth century or otherwise. However, this novel is certainly an epic read as we follow the lives of two families who live in the same street in Sheffield over the best part of two decades.

So, is this novel a family saga? An upmarket soap opera? I suppose the answers to both these questions is yes. Sort of. It's a saga, but its sheer bulk marks it apart from the more conventional familial fiction that is currently fashionable. And I suppose in some ways `The Northern Clemency' could be thought of as a bookish soap opera although, in my opinion, without the froth. If you like your fiction to tie up all the loose ends in a story, then this book will probably not appeal to you. Similarly, if you're more of a reader of novels with clear plot lines that carry through to a dramatic conclusion, you may also want to give this a miss. However, if you enjoy stories about people, the way they interact, the way they live their lives, and you're not the sort of reader who will find himself or herself huffing and puffing after 200 pages, wondering where this is all leading, then this novel could well be something that you'd enjoy.

Philip Hensher's storytelling reminded me of Raymond Carver at times, particularly when his characters' mundane lives explode into moments of emotional stress. The ordinariness of a family moving into their new house suddenly becoming all the more memorable when the mother of one of the neighbors discovers that her son has secretly acquired a pet snake. Already angered and humiliated by the disappearance of her husband, Katherine violently kills the snake in front of her new neighbors and those prying eyes already enjoying the spectacle from the comfort of their own homes.

There are no chapter markers in this novel, but it is split into five sections. Characters and events overlap via numerous vignettes. I particularly enjoyed the scenes of the young Francis newly arrived in Sheffield from London dealing with the awkwardness of starting at a new school. Perhaps the most interesting character is Tim Glover, he of the secret snake. His later life sneering and snarling his way through the red mist of left-wing politics as he and his cronies operate as agitators during the miners' strike give the novel some added punch.

The writing is excellent throughout, but if you do decide to read this novel, be prepared to devote a lot of time to it and don't expect a standard beginning, middle and end scenario. For all its lack of rigid structure, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.