The Northern Clemency (Paperback)

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• This item: The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher

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Review
'Lovingly rooted in 1970s and 1980s Sheffield, "The Northern Clemency" effectively reclaimed a lost genre of politically astute, richly decorated provincial family saga for modern readers.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent (Book of the Year) 'A tremendous book. Against an unfashionable 1970s background Philip Hensher has composed not so much a condition-of-England as a condition-of-humanity novel, which is gripping and surprising and shocking in all kinds of unpredictable ways, and enormously wide in psychological and moral scope. What a writer he is!' Philip Pullman 'Wise and strong and unputdownable.' A.S. Byatt, Financial Times (Book of the Year) Alex Clark, Sunday Telegraph (Book of the Year) 'A remarkable novel!a cumulative effect of luminous richness, like a perfect piece of orchestration!something more than brilliant cleverness makes this novel extraordinary.' Jane Shilling, Sunday Times 'Engaging and hugely impressive. 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 Times 'Hensher has a forensic eye for detail, providing nightmarish glimpses of the everyday!engrossing, amusing and moving.' Independent 'Expansive yet precise, it leads the reader from the minutiae of family life to broad public events with the surest of hands.' Guardian 'Hensher is fascinatingly good on how social transformation manifests itself in the textures, colours and manners of a culture!extremely funny, but also deeply humane.' Robert Macfarlane, Sunday 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.' D.J.Taylor, Independent on Sunday '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.' Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail 'The big question: is this novel worth, at a minute a page, 12 hours of our time? I think it is.' John Sutherland, Scotsman '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 'A suburban epic.' Financial Times 'An immense novel!Hensher presents the great drama and inexhaustible wonder of ordinary life.' Spectator '"The Northern Clemency" is a terrific novel -- a truly fine achievement.' New Statesman '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.' Mark Lawson, Esquire 'His descriptive flourishes are a pleasure.' Sunday Telegraph 'Humane, historically literate, aware of the trangenital graze and sheer of public issue on private experience.' Independent Witty fun!not only extremely funny, but also deeply humane.' Sunday TImes

Daily Mail
'A pin-sharp portrait of Sheffield.'

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2 Reviews 5 star:  (1) 4 star:    (0) 3 star:  (1) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:    (0)           Average Customer Review 4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   2 of 2 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Grim up North?, 23 May 2009 By  Claire Roberts - See all my reviews A wonderfully involving trawl through the lives of two families in Sheffield,spanning twenty years.Pin-point accurate period detail(the horror of home decor and party food in the 70's),a political element(inevitably the Miners' Strike),a highly accurate sense of place,credible characters and warm humour.Hensher's North is not the dark world of David Peace,it's more that of The Likely Lads with Sociology.It can be read alongside Crusaders(Richard T. Kelly)as a reflection on Northern-ness:both are long yet utterly absorbing.My only slight caveat would be that one of the plot strands is wrapped up in a slightly perfunctory way. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   3.0 out of 5 stars State of the kitchen, 2 Jul 2009 By  J. Minogue (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    `So the garden of number eighty-four is nothing more than a sort of playground for all the kids of the neighbourhood?' Hensher's book starts with the neighbouring adults discussing the adolescent children of the Glovers at a party which could have been thrown by Abigail herself - down to the party menu of coronation chicken and vol-au-vents. Hensher uses food rather than music to provide his date signposts. At the end of the novel Daniel, who is portrayed at the start lolling on a chair fantasising about swingers' parties with swapped car keys, spends three hours reading a novel in his trendy restaurant. It begins `So the garden....' What the ? 738 pages, hours of reading investment, and that's how the book ends? With a postmodern loop? Some of this novel is very engaging and the years from 1974 to 1996 are fascinating for me as that's when I was growing up - so there are those recognition moments that Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club nailed so well. Hensher is excellent on adolescents and on the minutiae of family life in the three bedroom / one bathroom house that these two families grow up in. I don't find his 'grown ups' so convincing. And then, Hensher can't seem to make up his mind whether these adolescents and children have been shaped and haunted by their formative years or whether it has all faded. You don't forget people, or the names of those people who lived across the road from you, whose parents still live opposite your parents and about whom you'll have been hearing for years because your mothers are still very close friends. For me, it's silly that Daniel can't remember Francis's name, that Jane vaguely remembers that Francis lives in London and unconvincingly decides to phone him after 10 years' silence to tell him a funny story. This turns out to be a heavy handed link to finding out that one of the matriarchs is seriously ill. This is a novel with pretensions for the macro as well as the micro and the social commentary and political aspects are much less successful for me. Tim is a cipher Socialist Worker type and so his violent scene involving police and miners and even Scargill just doesn't have the full tension that it should have. Nobody else seems very touched by the miners' strike despite where they are living and Bernie's job with the Electric! Hensher's women are rather stereotypical too: purposeless housewives drinking wine before their husbands get home, hardfaced career or socialist women, hedonists or slags. Daniel and Sandra have an early conversation where he tells her how he always knows when his girlfriends have their period because of their spots and increased ardour...his brother, Tim, notices a few hundred pages later that his students make appointments with him a four weekly intervals, spotty and emotional and driven by their hormones. Hmmmm. So, much of this novel I enjoyed, carried on through the 700+ page sprawl and genuinely wanting to know what was going to happen to the characters. Much was `clunky' to use his own criticism of various `state of the nation' novels in an essay in Prospect magazine (look it up online, much of his criticism applies to his own work). I can't help feeling that good editing out of 200 or so pages would have made for a tighter, more coherent novel. `What's it about?' Helen said. `Oh, I don't know,' Daniel said 'It's sort of about people like us, I think.' Hmmmm I don't know either.... Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 2 customer reviews...		Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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