Review - The Friendly Ones by Philip Hensher

The Friendly Ones by Philip Hensher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a tale of two families, next door neighbours in an affluent area of Sheffield, one of which is English (the Spinsters) and the other Bangladeshi (the Sharifullahs). Their first encounter takes place at the Sharifullahs' moving-in party in the 1980s, and from there the narrative takes us back and forth in time and place, exploring each family's back story and their respective meandering paths towards another party, celebrated jointly in 2016, which constituted the finale.

The story is not narrated in chronological order, and reading it is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together - filling in bits round the edges and finding the odd piece that you know is going to be important and think might belong in the centre, but have to put aside until you're getting the fuller picture. We start in 1980s Sheffield, then we're in 1970s Bangla Desh with the Sharifullahs witnessing a family tragedy in the wake of the war with Pakistan, then back in 1970s Britain watching the Spinster children grow up, then springing forward through 1990s towards 2005 and the 7/7 London bombings ... sometimes I find this sort of thing disorientating, but because of the quality of the writing and the vividly drawn characters, I found it fascinating putting the pieces together.

Yes, it's a story about immigration and racism but it doesn't have an agenda and it doesn't preach. The 'Friendly Ones' of the title refer both to various neighbours the Sharifullahs encounter as they assimilate themselves to life in Britain ('she's one of the friendly ones'...) and also to the name of a league of feared informants during the struggle for independence in Bangla Desh. At one stage the point is made that 'it's class, not race, [that] divides people.' The successful, professional Sharifullah daughter is horrified by an encounter with illegal immigrants trafficked over to Britain and exploited by their own people; the neat little Taiwanese wife of a Spinster son is horrified by her husband's former Oxford friend whose life has spiralled into drug dependency.

More than anything, this is a story about family relationships, both between siblings and between parents and children. There are feckless, selfish parents as well as wise and generous ones; hurtful, ungrateful children as well as loving and dutiful ones; loyal, kind siblings as well as snobbish and cruel ones. Family betrayals, humiliations and not-so-subtle cruelties are meted out, as well as kindness and selflessness – one description of parental sacrifice, mundane on the outside but huge on the inside, is mentioned almost in passing towards the end of the book and makes for one of the most moving, understated passages I've ever come across in a novel.

A rare five stars from me.





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