Product Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008. An epic chronicle of the last twenty 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 ten-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from a moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of fifteen-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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14215 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

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.'

Scotsman
'The big question: is this novel worth, at a minute a page, 12-hours of our time? I think it is.'

Customer Reviews

State of the kitchen
`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....

Much too long
Well I've finally managed to finish this book so there must be something positive about it. I've already forgotten most of the detail about the characters. For long passages nothing of substance happened other than shallow conversation and mostly a concentration on the minutae of day to day suburban life. Opportunities were lost to explore in greater depth the detail of the more interesting characters (three people out of about 20). I'm sure this book could have been compressed. I don't recommend it.

waiting for another error
Philip Hensher must have agood publicist, a review in the Guardian and inclusion in Waterstones 3 for 2 offer almost guarantees sales but a little more money on research would have helped this book enormously. Not much happens in the book which is much like many peoples lives but as a consequence it was the errors that started to dominate my reading of the book. Hensher may have been to Sheffield but has he ever been outside it?

En-route to picket orgreave Tim is told that they are meeting on the services on the M18 and that they will just appear to be three young people off for a day out in Machester. The services on the M18 are beyong Doncaster and only opened in the 90's. To get there from Sheffield means travelling 20m beyond Orgreave and is in the opposite direction to Manchester. But which Sheffield teenagers would ever go for a day out to Manchester. Orgreave is not a town and the picketing was not to prevent scabs going in but to stop Coke lorries coming out!

Geography is not Hensher's strong point as is obvious when he has Helen referring to Tinstone being beyond Rotherham and then talking about the Moors. There are no moors anywhere around Rotherham. A later comment about looking from North Wales over the Mersey to Liverpool conveniently disregards either the River Dee or the bulk of the Wirral.

Some of the details about Sheffield are accurate but why are some locations such as Tinstone and the shops on Division St fictionalised when others aren't and how easy would it have been to discover that last orders in Sheffield was 3pm not 2.30!

There's the basis of an engaging book here but there's a sloppiness to it which means that it never achieves anything of real merit.