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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
Philip Hensher’s new book shows that the epic, exciting, deeply engaged novel of society is not dead in England. The book has all the blessings of art, with the pulse of what Henry James called ‘felt life’ at the centre of its moral adventures.” Andrew O’Hagan
'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 décor 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
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Customer Reviews
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....
SONS AND LOVERS crossed with Catharine Cookson! Philip Hensher might like the comparison to Lawrence but probably not the Cookson one. This is essentially a "literary" novel, with an almost Jamesian attention to detail. What lifts THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY (such an odd title) out of the ordinary is the depth of character Hensher achieves. The book's length may help here: again like a soap, you spend long enough with these people for them to become believably real.
The time span is the 1970s to the 1990s. Bang in the middle comes the 1984 miners' strike when Margaret Thatcher took on Arthur Scargill and threw whole communities - Sheffield among them - onto the slagheap. None of our families are miners (Katherine's husband manages a power station), but one of the boys is an ultra-Left activist who gets caught up with the flying pickets.
In the second half of the novel we spend more time with the children as they drift into jobs (or unemployment) and find lovers, but for me the best part of the book is the central study of the parental marriages; two couples going through the ups and downs of life and just about managing to struggle through. I'd love to see Hensher distill his talent into something shorter and more sparsely written, like a David Storey novel from the 60s and 70s: I'm sure it would be a little gem.
[Reviewer is the author of SHAIKH-DOWN]
Unfortunately, it was a dull read, that I felt I had to plough through to get to the end, and a pretty uninspiring ending at that. (Sorry Philip, it just is).
Philip Hensher's prose and descriptive writing is terrific, but the book is FULL of long descriptive chapters about nothing very much at all. If some bloke walks into a room, I don't really care what the room decor is and whether the cushions are silk or tartan - just tell me what he's doing there !!
There are only 2 or perhaps 3 people in this book who are remotely interesting. Nick (obviously), Katherine - ish, and maybe Helen or Daniel. But other than that, the book has a very thin plot, has very little of significant interest happening in it, and - as others have said - it is a bit pretentious that at the end, one of the characters ends up reading THIS BOOK in the book. Very clever idea I suppose, but really !!
To be honest, I really wanted to enjoy this - it WAS fun reading about places I know well, and PH has obviously spent a lot of time in Sheffield, but at the end of the proverbial day, the descriptive writing hindered the plot formation. Whilst it could make a tolerably good one-hour tv drama or film, as a 700+ page book - forget it.
Plus points - good descriptive writing, interesting plot around Nick & the flower shop.
Negative - too long, only one real interest-grabbing 'plot' amongst many, many characters.
It starts so well and full of promise, the writing is good, the characters interesting and you care about the... Read more
In one scene it's 1974, and a girl, born in 1963, is described as being 14 years... Read more
To provide context I read around 100 each year. Read more
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