The Northern Clemency Paperback – 29 March 2012

After reading a review of this book in the Boston Globe this spring, I ordered it immediately (something I never do), before I could forget about this book that I'd never heard of. I'm so glad I did. I found a richly detailed narrative of the life of two neighboring families in the Yorkshire area of England. The details were never extraneous, but served to locate me completely in the world being represented. I felt so completely part of these lives, that I didn't want to pick up another piece of fiction for a while after I finished it. I just wanted to stay for a while in the world I'd gotten to enter so completely.I will now think of The Northern Clemency along with my other favorite family sagas--Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, and Vikram Seth's An Unsuitable Boy. But this one isn't set against a significant historical or or cultural context; rather it is the ordinariness of these families (with their own quirks and differences, small things that happen to them, but no big plot) that makes Hensher's accomplishment of creating a world that's so involving quite amazing.

“The Northern Clemency” is a rare British example of a novel about middle-class suburban life; novels on this theme appear to be commoner in America. (Richard Yates, John Cheever, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates are all American chroniclers of suburbia who come to mind). The action takes place between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s and follows the fortunes of two families from a Sheffield suburb, the Glovers (native to the area) and the Sellerses (recent arrivals from London). The “Northern” part of the title presumably refers to the Yorkshire setting; the significance of the “Clemency” part is more obscure.There are nine major characters- Malcolm and Katherine Glover with their children Daniel, Jane and Timothy, and Bernie and Alice Sellers with their children Francis and Sandra. Philip Hensher has set himself the difficult task of following the lives of all these characters through a period of twenty years. The result is less a traditional novel with a definite plot than something which reads like the novelisation of a soap opera. Plotlines are taken up, followed for a while and then dropped. In a television soap this normally happens when an actor leaves the series so their character has to be written out; in the novel it just seems as though the author got tired of them and decided to run with something else.An example is the relationship between Katherine Glover and her boss, Nick Reynolds, the manager of the flower shop where she works as an assistant. Early in the story Malcolm leaves his wife because he believes, wrongly, that she is having an affair with Nick, although the two are soon reconciled. What Katherine does not know is that Nick is not in fact the owner of the shop; the true owner is his own shadowy boss, a wealthy criminal who is investing his money in this and other small businesses as part of a money-laundering scheme. The Katherine/Nick story takes up a large part of the first half of the book, but thereafter fades out without really being resolved.Another plotline which is taken up and then dropped is the one involving Andrew, a schoolfriend of Timothy and Francis. He is a lonely child, the son of an eccentric father and depressive mother and the only boy in a family of girls. After a playground accident he is found to be suffering from a serious illness, but he leaves the story without our ever learning what happens to him; we presume he has died, but this is never made clear.Perhaps the best-realised character is Timothy, whose story is told in more detail than those of most of the other characters. When we first meet him he is a strange, obsessive boy of nine years old with a curious fixation with snakes. As a teenager he takes up the cause of radical left-wing politics, but also develops an obsession with Sandra, who is several years older than him. As an adult he becomes a university lecturer, but remains obsessed with Sandra even after she has emigrated to Australia and even though he has another girlfriend.The novel has been described as a “political epic”, but apart from the miners’ strike of 1984/5 it does not deal with politics to any great extent. The strike is largely described through the eyes of Timothy, who takes up the cause of the strikers with great enthusiasm, and Hensher tends to satirise his political views, treating them as just another crazy obsession on the part of someone with a crazily obsessive personality. Most of the characters are drawn from the white-collar or managerial middle classes; Malcolm, for example, works in a building society and Bernie is the manager of a power station. About the only major working-class characters are Daniel’s girlfriend Helen and her parents Phil and Shirley. Phil is a miner himself, but something of a small-c conservative, and does not welcome the involvement of people like Timothy in industrial disputes.There are some good points about the novel. Hensher has a good ear for dialogue and a keen eye for the trivia of British life. His descriptions of life in the seventies, the decade of prawn cocktails, avocado bathrooms and “Crystal Tipps and Alistair” (a children’s television programme) revived some of my own childhood memories of the period. Overall, however, the weakness of the plotting meant that this was not a book I particularly enjoyed. I was tempted to describe it as “overlong”, but on reflection that would not perhaps be the best description. Hensher could have stopped writing at any point in the last hundred, or even two hundred, pages and it would not have made a lot of difference to the quality of the finished book. On the other hand, he could have continued writing in the same vein for another hundred or two hundred pages, and that would not have made much difference either.

I wouldn't recommenced this book to just anyone. It can be tedious. It is quite long and is broken up into books rather than chapters.If you enjoy stories about every day life then you'll probably like this.

A rambling storyline at times grippingly told, at times told so hurriedly perhaps the author had places to get to. With some savvy corseting this could have been a stunner.Telling us TWICE that Sydney is 'like a Sheffield that has died and gone to heaven' and giving us plainly contradictory facts about a character within two pages is something an editor should correct.Worth reading, but ultimately disappointing.

I adored this novel, in defiance of some remarkably dismissive Amazon reviews, who seem mostly concerned about its length. Wimps.I too don't want to read overlong novels with nothing world-revalatory to say, but this book has other compensations. The 70s return within these pages, mostly conveyed by clothes and food, but also with the suburban dream of owning your own house in an area where everyone in the street mows their lawn and pops over to the neighbours for a regular chat. Events segue smoothly into the eighties, focus on the Miner's Strike for a while, and then swoop on into the 90s with beautiful insouciance. Two families take up the main body of the novel, which begins with a party thrown by Katherine and Malcolm, who have three children, teenagers Daniel and Jane and young Timothy. The second family consists of Bernie and Alice, with their teenaged daughter Sandra (later metamorphosing into Alexandra) and younger brother Francis.If you live north of Watford Gap, within these pages you will find yourself, somewhere. Cleverly, subtly and with glorious accuracy Hensher sketches out the main features of how Northern English family life changed over three decades. Almost sociologically authentic, the lives of the children and adults are played out over threads of plot taking in adultery, crime, children's obsessions, friendships, indiscretions, entrepreneurship, politics and sexual destiny. Characterisation is spot on, absolutely faultless. The novel is funny, tender in tone, brilliantly perceptive, yet entirely unshowy. To be honest, I was amazed. I didn't know Philip Hensher had a generous bone in his body. I loved it.