Book Review: The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher
The Northern Clemency
Philip Hensher
736 pages. HarperPerennial, 2008. $27, £9
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Sometimes you start reading a long book, and you hesitate about committing to it, the way you might hesitate about committing to, say, a TV series that may or may not be cancelled, or to a long movie. And at first, you don’t want to commit to spending the next week or two reading this book; you wonder if it will be worth your while, if it will be better than the other books you might be reading instead. Then, sometimes, you get to a point when, all of a sudden, it makes sense, and the question of commitment is far from your mind.
That’s what happened with me and Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency, a 700-odd page novel about people living in Sheffield, England (and London, and Australia). It’s a strange book that is as slow as treacle, but as cloying as French toast with maple syrup. While it’s a book about average, everyday people, there’s something about these people that made me want to read on. At first, they seemed boring, but there was a moment when it suddenly started working.
You first meet the members of two families, one that has lived in Sheffield all its life, and another that moves there from London. The parents are average or odd, the children like so many other children, with their foibles and strange attitudes and interests. But the children grow up, and you see them change over three time periods (the book is set first in the 70s, then the 80s, then the 90s). The parents age, deal with their difficulties, and get old. And somehow, out of all this, you feel deeply in touch with these characters, as different as they all are. Like any family, they have their quirks, but Hensher makes them so real that I couldn’t stop reading about them. Nothing spectacular happens to them, but nothing spectacular has happened to me in my life either.
This book is very sensitive and moving, dealing with the problems of real people over time. It has some weaknesses – notably, some characters that get sort of left behind at the end – but it is a poignant story. It is a novel for the common person: the one who dreams and hopes, who struggles and suffers, the one who has a few moments of joy in a life of swimming upstream. It’s not for everyone; you need to commit to a long book, but if you make the journey, you’ll come out a better person.
