The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

The award-winning author of The Mulberry Empire brings us a sweeping chronicle of ordinary lives profoundly shaped by both the subtleties of everyday experience and the larger forces of history.

In 1974, the Sellers family is transplanted from London to Sheffield in northern England. On the day they move in, the Glover household across the street is in upheaval: convinced that his wife is having an affair, Malcolm Glover has suddenly disappeared. The reverberations of this rupture will be felt for years as the connection between the families deepens. But it will be the particular crises of ten-year-old Tim Glover—set off by two seemingly inconsequential but ultimately indelible acts of cruelty—that will erupt, full-blown, decades later.

These lives unfold against a brilliantly rendered backdrop of twentieth-century England at the dawn of the Thatcher era: prosperity for some and disenfranchisement for others, which will have a drastic impact on both families.

Expansive and deeply felt, The Northern Clemency shows Philip Hensher to be one of our most masterly chroniclers of modern English life, and a storyteller of virtuosic gifts.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Historical Fiction, Family, Novels, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

597 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Hensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School.[2] He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine.[1] He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor, columnist and book reviewer for newspapers and weeklies such as The Guardian, The Spectator , The Mail on Sunday and The Independent.
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.

You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alex opened the blinds and pulled open the glass doors to the balcony, did the washing-up quickly, rinsing out the milk carton of its clotted curds before throwing it in the kitchen bin. She put a couple of bottles of beer and some water in the fridge for later.

If you like that kind of thing, you’ll love this novel.

****

STUFF DOES NOT HAPPEN MUCH

This is about two English families growing up between the 1970s and 1990s in a town up north called Sheffield. There are five people in one family and four in the other and so if you are keen on maths you have already deduced that there are nine major characters.

Nine characters and twenty years. Ordinary people, ordinary lives. This is not a thriller. Indeed, the author goes to great lengths to remove any possibility of thrilling the reader. It is remarkable how very few things happen to these people. It is in fact quite amazing the amount of dull stuff you can say about nine different characters. For instance, a guy retires. We get a page about what present his colleagues thought appropriate to give him. We get six pages about the retirement party, then some pages about what he did when he was retired – he pottered about. Is there a point to this? No, he’s just a character who retired, like what people do.

When something you could describe as “something” happens to one of our characters, there are maybe five or six of these somethings in the 738 pages, the novel becomes like a galvanised frog, making a couple of frantic hideous lurches, before settling down again into a somnolent catalogue of recent British interior decoration :

There was no space to dance in this little room, with its bulging fat tasselled three-piece suite decorated with a brown forestry pattern around the low coffee table

or

Alice couldn’t help looking about her at the house: the new Turkish rug, the old wood and glass coffee-table, the glass-domed preserved flowers on the shelf and the other knick-knacks, the new pair of sofas, which had replaced the three-piece suite

OKAY, A LITTLE BIT OF STUFF DOES HAPPEN

Some readers who are more kindly disposed towards this novel than myself will point out that there is a death by auto-erotic asphyxiation and that one of the nine main characters has a brain haemorrhage, and another appears to be eaten by a shark, but I say is that all you can come up with in 738 pages? I know novels that do all that in the first chapter. Autoerotic asphyxiation is the least that happens to people in some novels I have read.

Around page 520, yes, it’s true, something interesting appears to take place, a court case and a crisis in a marriage. But this is immediately followed on page 543 by five solid pages of travelogue (“beyond and below the crags, heading down into the valley that divided Rayfield Avenue, Ranmoor and Lodge Moor on one flank from Hillsborough and the moors on the other…”). Oh and the main defendant, who looms so large in the first part of the novel, we never find out what happens to him, he just disappears, poof! That was kind of just a little bit very aggravating.

THE NOVELIST’S NIGHTMARE

If I was a novelist this would be one of my nightmares. There is a scene around page 337 where two existing flatmates are doing a series of interviews of people applying to be the third flatmate. The interviews become increasingly absurd and cruel. Pretty good scene, in fact. Ho ho. But the exact same thing happens right at the beginning of the 1994 movie Shallow Grave. Did our author see the movie and it was a George Harrison/My Sweet Lord type of thing or was it a flat out coincidence? Ugh, if you found out afterwards, you would hate that.

THE TOTAL CARICATURE OF THE LEFT

One of the characters, Timothy, turns into a radical and at this point the novel stumbles into the total caricature of the left. Here’s the cardboard cutout feminist lefty Trudy on p392 talking to a miner’s wife during the famous miner’s strike :

“We feel your pain,” Trudy said exuberantly, and, as she always did, tried to embrace the chief mining wife. They sort of submitted to it, but you could see what they thought about Trudy, who, with her views on the systems that made deodorant, both vaginal and armpit, and shampoo seem necessary, wasn’t all that nice to be embraced by or even come very near to.

That’s Philip speaking, not one of his characters. I mean, FFS, right?

There’s another of these radical minor characters called Stig, a vicar’s son

Tim observed, with speechless envy, Stig’s sardonic habit of addressing his parents, to their resigned faces, as “Vicar” and “Fat Marge”

I mean, I just don’t believe any son would address his mother as Fat Marge even if she was made of a yellow butter substitute spread used for baking and cooking.

Mr Hensher’s editorialising continues during the miner’s strike.

The community hall, cluttered up now with banners and collection tins and boxes of donated cans of food, waiting for the boot-faced NUM wives to hand out to supposedly deserving cases. The food got collected in Sheffield town centre, half by the boot-faced contingent and half by a lot of silly students being supported through university by Mummy and Daddy

OLD FARTS AT PLAY

There are many moments where you think that Philip Hensher has been going around interviewing pensioners for this novel, and the pensioners would say things like “Remember how people would pause tapes on video players, this was before DVDs, young fellow, and someone would say that if you paused a videotape too long it would catch fire and burn the house down” and Philip would furiously write this down and it would appear on page 414.

RUBY TUESDAY IS NOT A BEATLES SONG

Gradually it became clear that Philip Hensher wishes to use this novel to catalogue 20 years of middle-class provincial fashions – their cuisine (“Jane had scallops wrapped in prosciutto; Robert had a porcini risotto”) interior decoration, furniture, architecture, cars, alcoholic and drug intake and municipal development. Everything is gradually filled in, like Sim City. Gastro-pubs, futons, Amstrad computers with start-up discs, hot-desking, they all march on at their appointed time.
But there is one huge area he avoids and that is pop culture. We follow his five assorted kids growing up into their 30s and in the whole 738 pages there is one reference to David Cassidy and someone thinks Ruby Tuesday is a Beatles song. (Okay, I did like that small joke). There are more references to Bruckner than The Sex Pistols. So none of these kids followed The Human League or Pulp (both Sheffield bands with thousands of fans)? None of them ever listened to non-classical music or went to any movies?

I STUMBLE INTO THE LIGHT, CROAKING

Yes, I made it onto the last damned page. You know, this may come as a shock, but I think it could have done with a bit of pruning. Take out the descriptions of vol-au-vents and you’ll lose 42 pages right there.

PS - for a long novel about ordinary people in which very little stuff happens and yet strangely the said novel is brilliant, see The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett (1908).

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: IF YOU LOVED (HATED) "THE CORRECTIONS", YOU'LL LOVE (HATE) THIS.

OK. Let's get the whole rating thing out of the way right now. Objectively speaking, this is a three-star book. But I enjoyed it very much - and read all 600 pages in about a day and a half. Which I think deserves some acknowledgement. There are many, many books that are far superior to "The Northern Clemency", but are way less fun to read. So I'm giving it 4 stars.

Here is an example of Philip Hensher in action as a critic. Writing about James Thackara's "The Book of Kings"

it's terrible. Startlingly badly written, with no apparent understanding of what drives people or how people relate or talk to each other, it is a book of gigantic, hopeless awfulness. You read it to a constant, internal muttering of 'Oh - God - Thackara - please, don't - no - oh, God, just listen to this rubbish'. It's so awful, it's not even funny. There is not one decent sentence in the book, nothing but falsity and a useless sincerity. It may be the very worst novel I have ever read.

Which has no bearing at all on my review; I just thought you might enjoy reading it.


Aspects of The Northern Clemency that I liked:

It's a sprawling portrait of two families, spanning the period from 1974 to about 1994. Yes, that's right: the Thatcher years.
Hensher is really terrific at capturing the dynamics of relationships within a family.
He can be very funny for long stretches.
He can also write very movingly about intra-family tensions and loyalties.
With one glaring exception, the characters are believable, and he keeps us interested, even though the events of their lives, objectively viewed, are pretty mundane.
So if you like a nice, generation-spanning family drama that's a 'good read', The Northern Clemency definitely has something to offer.

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't warn you that:

The book is way too long. At 600 pages, it's a bit of a doorstopper, and it cries out for editing on every page. If one of the characters gets a drink, expect to be told the height, weight, hair color and demeanor of the bartender, as well as what he's wearing. Somewhere around page 500, we spend four pages in the company of a woman called Rosalie, we learn about her relationships with her heroin-addicted son, with the different security guards in the building where she cleans offices at night, with the late-shift supervisor, Brendan, her nosy neighbors etc. Rosalie has grit and is a survivor. But the only function she serves in moving the action along is to pass along something she reads in one of the main character's recycling bins. Which told us nothing we didn't already know anyway.

Don't even get Hensher started on anything food-related. The description of a fish pie can run to two pages. Canapes and appetizers receive similar attention, bordering on the fetishistic. Hensher's disdain for the use of easy cultural references, such as pop songs, to evoke a particular point in time is on record. Apparently it doesn't bother him to use vol-au-vents, shag carpeting, and specific TV programs to do the same thing.

Although the book is set in Sheffield, against the backdrop of the miners' strike and Thatcher's response, there is no political commentary of any depth. To be fair, Hensher may wish to make the (valid) point that even during periods of (relative) political turmoil, the interest and engagement of the upper middle class was virtually nil. But his development of Tim, the troubled youngest kid in one of the families as a caricature Trotskyite who is laden with every tired cliche in the book is unforgivable. And boring.

Baffling title.

Occasionally, the plot just meanders into a completely implausible digression. This didn't bother me particularly, as Hensher generally manages to keep things entertaining, and is often very funny.

What can I say? I enjoyed The Northern Clemency a lot, warts and all.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a little tricky to rate and review, and three stars may be a trifle harsh - there were several elements I liked, but many that I didn't and a couple I found preposterous, and it made me appreciate that Jonathan Coe does this kind of microcosm of a nation novel better and less heavy handedly. It is also too long, and for me a little unbalanced politically - the characters on the right all seem reasonable and sympathetic whereas the one who represents the left is both radical and mentally disturbed.

I enjoyed the first 200 pages or so a lot, a very entertaining story that reflected the author's own childhood in the middle class suburbs on the west side of Sheffield. This introduces the two main families of the story - the Glovers who are Sheffield natives and the Sellers family whose move from London opens the book. The whole thing is told by an omniscient character whose account follows different characters for extended periods.

Where things start to go wrong for me is in Book Three, which is set against the backdrop of the miner's strike and the Thatcher government. Hensher barely acknowledges that this government was deeply unpopular in Sheffield (the so-called Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire), and that the accepted media narrative on the violence that accompanied the strike was as compromised as the initial account of the Hillsborough disaster, both being filtered through the largely discredited South Yorkshire police. So the supposed first hand account of the battle of Orgreave seems sensationalist to me.

The really preposterous stuff is saved for the final part, in which the left wing firebrand Timothy becomes seriously deluded, travelling to Australia on a bizarre personal mission to "rescue" a character who had gone missing since part one.

I think that is more than enough negativity - I did enjoy large parts of the book, which is quite funny and perceptive in places, and the first part in particular brought back many memories of a time and British culture that are now long gone.

[Maya Panika · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY by PHILIP HENSHER

This is a most interesting book. A truly epic tale (around 300,000 words) of the everyday that follows the lives of two Sheffield families from the seventies to the mid nineties – and it really is a story of the everyday. Nothing truly momentous happens, even the ‘Big’ events are the Big things that happen to us all; death, sudden life threatening illness, emigration, job change, a court case. Nothing world-shattering happens. There are no startling twists of plot because there’s actually, very little plot – just a vast, spidering tapestry of the normal things of Life .

Which is what makes it such an unusual and compelling book. I can’t say I found it hard to put down – I did put it down, frequently (it’s a very big book, my wrists got tired) but I always picked it up again. I wanted to know what was going to happen to these ordinary, fascinating, dreary, hateful, selfish, kind, cruel, indifferent, loving and loveable people.

Some I grew to dislike intensely; vain, self-centred Sandra, the oftentimes cruel and selfish Katherine. For all his deceits, I rather liked Nick. I adored poor sweet nerdy, Francis but most of all, my heart went out to Tim. I never really worked out whether the author wanted us to hate him, sometimes it felt like that, but I liked him. Life dealt him a rough hand and he didn’t often deal with it well but from the moment his mother did the cruellest thing imaginable, he consistently broke my heart.

I didn't care for the political slant and that coloured my feelings for the book and the characters. The times were dealt with... correctly, probably, bearing in mind the overwhelmingly middle-class-suburban background of the characters. At the height of the Miner's Strike, the only true supporter is the (slightly clichéd) middle-class Marxist.The only representative of the miners themselves is a right-wing would-be-scab-if-he-had-the-nerve. It's not how I remember it - and for that reason, it's the lowest point in the book for me, but there are stronger things here to outweigh the weaker bits.

The style is smooth, unremarkable, intense in detail – in an almost Dickensian way at times. It doesn’t get in the way of the characters and their world. It’s a world I know quite well. My family are from that side of Sheffield described so meticulously and the places - Broomhill, Sheffield City Library, the Rivelin Valley, Cole Brothers – so very well drawn this book was special to me in that respect above all others. You don’t have to be from Sheffield to love this book, but it does help. It's a good book (but imo, not half as good as some reviewers are claiming)

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is it about Brits and novel-writing? Must be something in the water. They are so good at it. Or, rather, they are very good at a particular type of novel (what F.R. Leavis would call "The Great Tradition") that I really gravitate toward. The finest American novelists tend toward the mythopoetic (Ellison, Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville) whereas the best Brits tend toward the secular and social. This is a reduction, but not a gross one, and many implications (and strong opinions) follow from this basic divide (call it the transcendental versus quotidian fight). And various writers would be hard to plot on either side of this divide (David Mitchell and Richard Powers, say, who write "serious" novels that blend the mythopoetic with the social novel). At any rate, Hensher's book seems part of a little renaissance of finely tuned, quietly brilliant British novels of manners (whose parents would be, say, Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Alan Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty). This kind of novel isn't absent in the US by any means (and has many gifted practitioners here as well--Francine Prose can do great things with the social novel), but it doesn't seem to get as much play here, or earn as much respect, as it does in the UK. (Hence Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS is the exception that proves the rule to books like Michael Chabon's and David Foster Wallace's). Some would say that Hensher's book is uninteresting because it does nothing "new" in the genre (the postmodernist argument). But it's in my view a gripping novel, as funny as Muriel Spark and as serious-minded and spiritually generous as Iris Murdoch at their best. It's also ripping good social history.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this. I don't think it's 'great' literature, but for nearly three weeks as I listened to it en route to work, I found it vastly entertaining - in the way that a well-constructed soap opera is entertaining.
Other reviewers haven't been especially kind to it, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/... or http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/... and http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-re...
Would I have enjoyed it as much without the excellent narration by Carole Boyd? Maybe not. But if you enjoy a panoramic bit of nostalgia from a place you've never been (and are highly unlikely to visit), this will be fun.
And it does show the sad truth, that for most people, momentous change is something they barely notice because they're so busy with their own banal lives.
Except to them, their lives are not banal at all...

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book gave rise to mixed feelings of fascination and wearisomeness. The Northern Clemency is part history, part sociology and totally compelling—but too long—read. The story is sprawling, detailed and ambitious in scope and design. Hensher’s superbly nuanced and detailed writing makes the relative mundanity of these family’s lives almost compulsively readable. The book was so compelling that it kept me listening* even though I kept thinking to myself, “Gaaawd, I can’t stand all this excruciating detail!” It’s just too long and has more extraneous detail than I wanted to know.
(*I listened to the audio format of the book)

This book is much the same as life for most of us, ordinary and boring. That doesn't mean life isn't worth living. And it also doesn't mean that this book isn't worth reading. If you like sprawling literary evocations of familial drama, then this book is for you. After getting half way through the book I began to care a bit about the characters and wanted to know where life took them. I kept thinking, surely a book this long must have something worthwhile in the plot somewhere. In the end the story was pretty much like real life—some things are resolved, some are not; some things are better, some are not; there is a death, but life goes on for others.

This book comes about as close as possible to providing the experience of living 20 years without actually using up 20 years of time to do so. I guess a another way of saying this is, reading this book seems like it takes 20 years, but actually it only takes 20 hours to read.

Defenders of the book have suggested that it was inspired by “the great nineteenth-century Russian novels.” On the other hand, critics say they see more influence from Desperate Housewives than from Tolstoy. I think they're both right. Hensher has given us a 21st Century update to the great 19th Century novels. If we don't like it, it may be an indication of how we feel about 21st Century literary styles.

Frankly, I am intrigued with the comparison of this book with War and Peace. Just as War and Peace follows life on two different Russian estates within the context of the Napoleonic war, The Northern Clemency follows the members of two neighboring families during the anti-union and pro-privatization economic policies of the Thatcher government. And of course, they are both very long stories filled with much detail. However, I suspect that War and Peace will still be a classic one hundred years from now, and The Northern Clemency will be forgotten.

This book can be classed as a historical novel because it deals with the economic and political changes in the 70’s and 80’s in northern England. The second half of the book in particular addresses politics and policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (i.e. privatization of public services and coal miners' strike). But in the end the surrounding politics is a pale backdrop for the lives of the fictional characters. Besides, the 70’s and 80’s aren’t so far in the past to be called historical. So I’ve classed the book as being just a novel.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

On page 391 of this 597 page novel, a main character has "been reading The Far Pavilions for four weeks now, persevering with it; handling seemed to have increased its bulk by half as much again." I knew how she felt: The Northern Clemency also seemed to expand as I turned its pages, its plotlines and characters multiplying, new tendrils shooting off in two dozen directions, old stems thickening. Was Hensher mocking his own novel here? The book does end with a metafictional twist, as another character picks up a new novel and reads the first few words, which are also the first words of The Northern Clemency.

I spent the first 95% of the novel wondering where it was headed, if anywhere. I wondered if a novel needs a trajectory. Essentially we follow a rather large cast of characters - two families, nine family members total, plus all their neighbors, friends, associates, lovers, employers, roommates - from 1974 to 1994, covering the prime ministerships of Harold Wilson to John Major. (The novel is set in Sheffield, England, and briefly London and Australia.) There are no deep or hideous mysteries to be solved. Each character has ups and downs, some more severe than others. No one turns out to be a serial killer. The most dramatic plot twist is perhaps a brain hemorrhage late in the book, then there's some unpleasantness in Australia (which was a bit too much of a sour note, I thought). This is the second of Hensher's novels I've read, and based on it, I think it's fair to call him the British Jonathan Franzen. There are also similarities to Alan Hollinghurst's last two novels, The Line of Beauty and The Stranger's Child. The length of this book is borderline inexcusable, but it's redeemed by having most of its characters turn out to be engaging and humane (the reader has doubts initially), people who end up doing the right thing.

Still, some moments might push you over the edge, like when Hensher introduces five new characters on page 459 (that's about 75% into the book) - characters who are office cleaners, a security guard, and a cleaning supervisor - and then drop them four pages later once the office has been cleaned, never to be heard from again. Does everything in a novel need to serve a purpose? There are other subplots that feel unsatisfyingly truncated and unexplored - a major character named Nick feels a burst of once-in-a-lifetime love for a minor character named Sonia, and that's the last we hear of it. Maybe the point is to capture the truth of real life, where everything is messy, people drop in and drop out with no warning.

[Ian Mapp · Rating 2 out of 5]

One word to sum up this behemoth of a book is a chore.

It plots the lives from 1970-2000 of two families in sheffield - The glovers and the sellers. They live in the same street, with a house party happening at the time when the sellers move up from London.

It uses the standard technique of plotting the family lives against the key political events of the time, mainly the miners strike.

So what is wrong with the book. Let me count the ways.

At 737 pages it is far too long. Nothing of any real note happens that requires this length. The initial chapter sums this problem up perfectly. Its about 150 pages of attention to detail to tell the story that the glovers matriach has foreclosed a one night stand with her dodgy boss at a flower shop (its a front for drugs money laundering) and she hasnt embarked on a full flung affair. This is summarised by the unlikely event of her stamping to deaths her youngest sons (Tim) pet snake in the street. As clumsy a metaphor as you could ever expect.

Next is the characterisation. Its very poor and I struggled keeping up with who was a member of which family, having to write this on note paper in the inner sleeve of the book to remind me. This is a crying shame from the author as over a 12 day read, we should really now and care for the characters. But this doesnt happen. It doesnt help when new characters - such as the boy dying from some disease - are introduced, given a chapter and then disappear from the story. It also doesnt help when Sandra character changes to Alex half way through the book.

The politcis are a missed event. The tension of the period never materialises and it seems a missed opportunity to educate, inform or discuss the key events of the time.

I really am unsure how this made the prize list. I would give it 2 stars for ambition but this was a real chore to get through and i know (apart from the weight of the book) this will be instantly forgotton in a few weeks.

A shame. It was my time of book. Rumours of a hurricane is a similar example of this type of book that does things so much better.

[Adrian White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good enough to read over 700 pages but nowhere near as good as I thought it was going to be. An engaging ( and occasionally overwhelming) collection of people like you and me: living mundane lives; fucking each other up and fucking each other over; hearts of gold and hearts so cold. All of human life isn't here in these pages but a fair slice of it is. Just . . . expected more.

[Alex Csicsek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sweeping novel covers decades in the lives of two families in suburban Sheffield in a series of episodes of varying length exploring family life, love and romance, growing up, Thatcher-era politics (particularly the miners' strike), the death of the English cities, and identity in all its shapes and forms. With nine main characters and plenty of peripheral ones, it's not surprising a book of such scope comes to 750 pages, but it is an easy read and can be done quite quickly and enjoyably.

Although cluttered initially by a few scene-setting episodes, the most clearly identifiable start is when the Sellers are moving into their new home and greeted by the woman across the street stomping her son's pet snake to death in the front lawn (or garden as the Brits say, but even an Anglophile writing a review of a thoroughly British novel by a writer as self-aware of his Englishness as anyone should stick to his native American language, in my opinion). Hensher is only moderately successful in framing the rest of the novel with this story. His episodic approach doesn't lend itself to a coherent plot and attempts to force cohesion through stories like the snake-stomping is ineffective. That said, real life is often lacking in cohesion, so this aspect is actually a testament to the realism achieved.

The characters and the cities where they live are wonderfully drawn. Hensher understands and appreciates his characters and their settings and it shows. The one notable acception is the adult Tim, whose radical politics are caricatured and seem out of place in the nuanced novel in which it exists. The affection developd for the characters more than compensates for lack of plot, and what they reveal about life in post-war suburban England (and, of course, life in general) is rewarding. Recommended.

[Jen Bohle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take two random families living on the same street and write a novel spanning 20 years that chronicles their lives and fortunes and you have Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency. In this case, the novel centers around two British suburban families --- Malcolm and Katharine Glover, their children Daniel, Jane, and Tim and the Sellers family across the street, consisting of Bernie, Alice, Sandra, and Francis. I’ve seen reviewers describe these as “dysfunctional” families, but one of the points of this work is presumably to illustrate that every family defies any norm or prescribed standard. Indeed, the individual quirks of the characters, when magnified by Henshaw’s writing, serve this same normalizing function. We’re all weird.

The work is, paradoxically, about everything and nothing. I was attempting to explain to a friend of mine what this novel is about (his wife writes mystery and suspense novels) and when I was finished all he said was, “so basically nothing happens?” Well, erm, yes, nothing much, really. We’ve got a Jonathan Franzen/ Virginia Woolf combo writing the sublime of the everyday and the tragedy of the everyday. And unless you’re a wealthy jetsetter or adventurer, it is the banal everyday where most everything happens --- dinner parties, illness, quiet mistakes, marital complacency, child rearing -- this novel encompasses the realm of domesticity beautifully (and perhaps better than even Franzen’s zeitgeisty novels). This is a thoroughly British novel, and one that will likely resonate more with British readers as locales and shops and Thatcher era politics are evoked. Northern Clemency is the literary equivalent of a still life painting; I can now fully detail middle class dinner menus from the 70s and 80s (coronation chicken or vol au vents, anyone?), fashion (polyester neck tie blouses) and home interiors. National and world politics is, appropriately for this work, not often mentioned except for Tim Glover's forays into socialism and the 1984 Miner’s strike.

Ok, so admittedly, I set this novel aside twice, determined that I would begin something else. And then I couldn’t stop thinking what the characters might be doing and about how odd the children are and what would become of them. It helps that the sentences are beautiful, full of unusual imagery and thoughtful metaphors. I imagine Hensher laboring for hours over various dazzling descriptions.

Part of the problem with this novel’s likeability is that there’s no character with whom we can really sympathize. They’re all either a bit pathetic or somehow insufferable. I suspect, though, that this is because Hensher lets us know them intimately over a long stretch, and few of us would look particularly pleasant under an author’s dissecting gaze. There’s also an undercurrent of bleakness coupled with an expectation that something unspeakably horrific is going to occur, and I‘m not sure if that was just me or if this was intentional and others have noticed it as well. I kept waiting for something apocalyptic to happen, especially with regard to inflexible and obdurate Tim, the youngest son of Katherine and Malcolm Glover.

The Northern Clemency, though occasionally humdrum and plodding, will become a classic of late 20th century British life. Hensher’s consistently measured and poetic prose and his ability to illuminate the everyday compromises and small acts of forgiveness that make ordinary peoples’ lives livable ensure his place in the modern canon, or at the very least in the pages of the New York Times book review.

[Isabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should have loved this book; it has everything that makes a novel I cannot put down... loads of character, great settings, multi-generational plot spanning over decades etc...
The story takes place in Yorkshire, Sheffield actually and follows the trials and tribulations of two middle-class families living across from each other. In turn and through time, we "touch base" with each character: the two couples, together and separately, and the five children whose paths cross every so often. There is a lot of drama, a lot of angst, a lot of pent-up darkness and enough moral flaws to go around.
This is obviously a book that was written as an homage to the great British novelists: Dickens first and foremost, George Eliot, Trollope surely.
So, I should have loved the novel, and yet I did not... Overall, I was disappointed and struggled through most of the novel. I found the characters a little too formulaic at times, the pace was very uneven, moving briskly in the best Victorian fashion and then coming to a crawl for long introspective passages (possibly in homage to V.Woolf??), and finally I thought that the backdrop of the mining crisis of the Thatcher era was presented like a history lesson much more than a literary setting, not to mention that, due to its incredible dramatic, albeit historical richness, it could have played a greater, more interesting part in the novel.
To sum it up, I really thought the novel was too "studious"...

[Felice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to warn you I'm going to need some extra adjectives here. I might be saying brilliant, wonderful, impressive and glorious so often that I have to resort to using multi-layered as well. Let me apologize in advance for that. I've read The Northern Clemency (picked up solely because it is so very extra chubby) by Philip Hensher and it is fantastic. You can stop reading my puny writing now and go get a copy of it if you want. I won't be insulted.

Clemency starts out in 1970's Sheffield and follows two families:the Glovers and the Sellers. Malcolm and Katherine Glover have three children and have been Sheffield staples forever. Bernie and Alice Sellers, parents of two, are recent arrivals having moved to Sheffield from London for Bernie's new job. The day the Sellers move in Malcolm accuses his wife of having an affair and disappears. The next twenty years bring other catastrophes and passing cruelties both personal and nation wide that have lasting effects on both families.

This a War and Peace type of novel only without all the war part. Clemency is not only concerned with the events of its characters lives but it also details the physical, social, economic and political world they inhabit. Nothing happens in a vacuum in The Northern Clemency. It's a big novel that charts the internal and external world of two generations in one community. A cross section. This is the book for someone who wants to be entertained and at the same time come away with a complete portrait of the times.

Hensher has a firm grip on this tremendous slice of life novel and yet he makes it all feel very organic and realistic. It's as if the neighborhood gossip were giving you the straight skinny over a drink while you perused the March 1973 edition of Ladies Home Journal (Speaking of which a little Can This Marriage Be Saved would not have gone amiss here.) rather than an extremely talented writing is behind it all plotting away, pulling strings and researching every visual element of 70's and 80's decor and food. Nothing occurs in The Northern Clemency that doesn't have repercussions. From the minutiae of day to day domestic life to the events of the time that were felt across the country everything is put into his microscope, inspected and then brought to our attention with magnificent writing.

I was totally impressed and after one quick phone call my local independent bookstore has ordered me an earlier novel written by Philip Hensher, The Mulberry Empire. Yippee!

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this book thinking that I might find it fabulous, given some of the reviews and the subject matter. That attitude usually seems to put a book——or a movie, or a person——at a disadvantage because so much is expected. Well, this is a long, winding narrative filled with characters who, at best, are mostly only semi-likeable. The writing is generally very good, although this was one of those books in which I not infrequently stopped and reread sentences, wondering exactly what the author was trying to say. It was overdone at times; I thought I could feel the author getting too self-consciously caught up in the way he wanted to depict or describe something. I was disappointed in the degree to which time and place were actually conveyed. Still, I liked the book very much; go figure. It held my interest throughout; I was never bored. It wouldn't be for everyone. It's too long by about 10%, as are so many current novels. I wavered between 3 and 4 stars but think this deserves the higher rating.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Hensher missed winning Britain's Booker Prize last month by a hair, but now comes a surprising consolation prize from the United States: Amazon has named The Northern Clemency the best book of 2008. I like this enormous novel very much, but I'm surprised that the savvy booksellers at Amazon would make such a daring choice in a recession-bound holiday season. After all, last year they picked Khaled Hosseini's bestselling A Thousand Splendid Suns. Given the army of book clubs already primed by The Kite Runner, that was about as risky as choosing Santa as favorite Christmas celebrity. Amazon may disappoint some customers with a novel as demanding as The Northern Clemency, but it's encouraging to see that the ascendancy of online booksellers needn't mean the end of high culture.

Though still relatively unknown in the United States, Hensher is a respected writer and critic in London. In 2002 he published The Mulberry Empire, an alarmingly relevant novel about England's efforts to overthrow the government of Afghanistan during the early 19th century. And in 2003, Granta magazine included him on their sometimes prescient list of "Best Young British Novelists" along with the now famous Monica Ali and Zadie Smith.

The Northern Clemency thoroughly justifies Hensher's place in that Olympian group. It presents a continuously evolving panorama of two middle-class families in Sheffield, where the author grew up, about 150 miles from London. In 1974, when the city "was entering on the last phase of its industrial greatness," this was, Hensher writes, a place that "made its money from steel; it was driven by its waters; it was built on coal." But those elemental foundations are about to shift dramatically, and over the next 20 years, the gossipy citizens who live on an ordinary Sheffield street will endure upheaval they could not have imagined.

The Glovers have three children and maintain a dull, passionless marriage that Hensher examines with comic but never demeaning concentration. Malcolm Glover works in property management and enjoys battle reenactments in his spare time. His frustrated wife, Katherine, has upset the family routine by taking a job at a florist's to give herself something to do besides the children's laundry. Their new neighbors, the Sellerses, have come from London so that Bernie Sellers can become deputy manager of the electric company. On the day they move in, they watch Katherine run out of her house with a snake and stomp on its head while little Tim Glover trails after her shrieking in horror. Thus begins a complicated friendship between these two families.

The story moves along from one engaging episode to another as the Glovers and the Sellerses grow older, drift apart and reconnect in surprising ways over the next two decades. A number of things happen in the five sections of this long novel, but it's impossible to speak of The Northern Clemency as having a plot in the conventional sense. In fact, it's easy to imagine some readers waiting impatiently -- and futilely -- for the story to begin. But Hensher's intricately crafted sentences flash with wit, his dexterity with telling detail is captivating, and his dialogue delivers the guilty pleasure of eavesdropping. If you give yourself over to this novel's organic movement, you'll fall in love with its startlingly perceptive depiction of these people. And eventually, you'll enjoy the satisfaction of seeing how these disparate scenes lock into each other in the most poignant ways.

The first two sections show the Glover and Sellers households when their children are still living at home. Suburban repression is the rule, "reserve and restraint, the usual conditions of an English life." Acts of rebellion and cruelty are politely ignored with "a party-like smile as if at a personal comment in bad taste from the friend of a guest, brought and welcomed under sufferance." Hensher writes that "no one seemed able to talk to each other. . . . They all had their reasons for concealing matters from or snubbing each other." Katherine's husband blurts out the whole culture's philosophy in a rare moment of agitated candor: "If you don't say anything it can't become important, but if you say it everyone's ever after got to walk round it like a pile of rocks in the living room." And so they walk around every disappointment and burden, even though Katherine's entire body is "written over with the fact of her obligations." Her husband notes the lack of intimacy between them but can't imagine living any other way. "For most of their lives together," Hensher writes, "it had seemed to him that he was admitted only to the public downstairs rooms of Katherine's mind. The more intimate spaces and speculations, the whole upstairs and attics of her thinking were kept from him."

There are spot-on scenes of the children at school, particularly Sandra and Francis Sellers, who never escape accusations of being London snobs; their cringe-inducing experiences in PE are classic. In later sections of the novel, we follow them and the Glover children, now adults, to London where they struggle to find jobs and affection in a country transformed by economic and social change. Loneliness haunts them all, especially poor Francis, who "was tall and drawn-out in shape as someone else's shadow." In one painfully naked confession, he cries: "I was wrong, deciding not to be shy. . . . Because if you're not shy you go out into the world, but if you are shy then you stay at home, and it's really better to stay at home. You're going to be happy if you stay at home." Sandra Glover, meanwhile, can't wait to get away and cut herself "off from the guilt and burden of family. . . . She could feel herself shedding her ties like a dog shaking itself after a bath."

The later sections grow more explicitly interested in class, sometimes in ways that emphasize differences between America and England. (Even the chapter titles -- "Mardy," "Nesh," "Gi'o'er" -- will send you scurrying to a dictionary of Briticisms.) We see the disastrous coal miners' strike of 1984 from several competing points of view. Tim Glover, whose sad plight dominates the end of the novel, becomes a comically self-righteous Marxist, but his radical cant hides a dangerous sexual fury. Meanwhile, his slick brother, Danny, responds to the fluctuating economy with just the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that Margaret Thatcher celebrated.

This absorbing portrait of a large group of people invites comparison to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, but Hensher is a gentler satirist and treats his characters more tenderly. Indeed, he writes with such illuminating attention to the flutterings of everyday hope and despair that you come away from these pages feeling like a more insightful person. That's all we ask from the best books of the year.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/20...

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel, written by British author Philip Hensher and published in 2009, takes place in Sheffield, a town originally built around the coal mines and steel production in Britain. The story evolves over twenty years and is told in three parts, the first beginning in the 1970s with Thatcher’s strong influence on Conservative politics. It then moves on to the eighties in part two, the time of John Major and to the nineties in part three, the time of Tony Blair. The book explores the lives of two suburban middle-class families, the Glovers and the Sellers who live on opposite sides of a street overlooking the Yorkshire moors. The Glovers are long-time residents of Sheffield, while the Sellars are in the process of moving north from London as Bernie Sellers takes on a new job at the Electric Board.

Katherine and Malcom Glover have three children, Daniel, Jane and Tim. Their son Daniel is a handsome young man, at the time in his teenage years when he is eager to bed anything that moves. His sister Jane is quiet, always has a notebook and pen in hand and has convinced herself she is writing a novel. Tim, the youngest child, is a troubled boy who loves snakes and harbours an underlying streak of cruelty.

Alice and Bernie Sellers, recent arrivals to Sheffield, have two children, Sandra and Francis. Not everyone in the family is happy about leaving their perfectly comfortable home in London to move to this darker, more grim looking landscape. Alice and Bernie are determined to adapt to their new home but both their children are wary. Sandra the oldest, on the cusp of exploring her emerging sexually, is finding these new feelings difficult to keep in check and is a little wild. Frances is a quiet boy, shy, sensitive and studious. Neither is looking forward to the tricky process of trying to establish friendships at their new school. Their mother Alice, is a calm, friendly woman who is supportive of her husband’s recent promotion and determined to make this new life work for them.

Catherine Glover recently went back to work at a new flower shop owned and run by a name man Nick with whom she had a brief affair. On the day the Sellers move into their new home, Malcolm has disappeared and Catherine believes he has left her after learning of her affair. She is so distraught that when she first meets Alice, she blurts out the story of her adultery, while Alice sits and listens supportively. It is the first contact and an abrupt beginning to the relationship between the two families whose lives will meet and intersect over the following years.

The narrative follows the lives of each of these people as their stories unravels in this three-part book, the first introducing the characters and spending most of the time with Catherine, her new job at the flower shop and her affair. The second leaping ahead to the eighties and the coal miner’s strike in 1984 and by the third part, the children are adults and have left home and husbands have retired. The novel closes in 1994.

The lives of these two families, run parallel, intersect and interact at various times as the years pass and include several dramatic events. After Catherine’s revelations to Alice about her adulterous affair and its impact on her family, she discovers Tim’s pet snake and kills him on the front steps of their home; Malcolm returns home after a two-day disappearance without a word of explanation; Sandra and Francis both have nasty experiences trying to establish friendships at their new school and Sandra’s experiments with her “flirt and flash” behavior which creates a lasting impression on Tim. There is also a tense courtroom scene at a criminal trial and a body turns up in the Pacific, partially eaten by a shark.

The lives of these two families are not just a series of dramatic events, they are strung together by the details of everyday life, the numerous and mundane happenings that occur between those dramatic moments such as Daniel’s leisurely days at the pool; Malcolm’s careful weeding of his garden and the niggly details of Catherine’s grocery shopping and meal preparation. Readers may find much of this tiresome and wonder where it is all headed, with Hensher’s attention fixed on his characters, their thoughts and the important and unimportant events in their lives. In the process, he shows how for everyone but Tim, most are unaware of the social and political life that surrounds them. They serve only as backroom noise to their focus on the little part each is playing on life’s stage. But they are there in the details: Danial meets the daughter of a coal miner who is on strike, a Tim connects with woman activist who avoids personal hygiene, emits a strong odour and maintains her home as a woman-only zone for specific days of the week, Tim spends hours in the library pouring over Marxist literature and participates in a strike where scabs are attacked, bricks are hurled and bodies become bruised and bloodied. Class distinctions are explored and spill over to the other side of town, as Danial establishes a friendship with a man in his thirties who doesn’t work, lives at home and spends his days on the sofa until he hits the bars at night with Danial buying his drinks.

There are some vignettes that are quite moving including the scenes with Alice in hospital and Bernie and Francis at her bedside; Bernie driving home but having to pull over to the side of the road to weep and Catherine and Malcolm quietly going through a stack of old photo albums, reviewing their long life together.

Some readers have compared what happens on these many pages (there are over 700!) to a soap opera, as readers catch a glimpse of the lives of these people and their problems and read pages and pages of dialogue. The narrative dives deep with these details, while the linear story jumps from one period to the next, skipping junks of years in leaps.

The book takes some time to read and some, frustrated, opt out and leave it behind. Others enjoy learning about the lives of these people with Hensher probing their psyches and showing when, how and if, the social and political environment of the time affects their behavior. There are even small injections of humour here and there to ease the interpersonal tension.

Hensher pays attention to the setting of Sheffield with its mines and steel mills. He notes the smoking chimneys, the steaming slagheaps and the dirty, smelly air in the first section which by section three in the mid- 1990s, is replaced with restaurants, bars, trendy shops and cleaner air.

I am not sure what to say about the title, unable to clearly understand how or where it fits. Clemency refers to mercy, but I am not sure whose.

Hensher has enjoyed a notable career, selected as a Man Booker Prize Judge in 2001, longlisted for his novel “The Mulberry Empire” in 2002 and shortlisted for this novel in 2008. Although heralded by critics, everyday readers have faulted the book for its heavy detail, with a story they believe does not say much and characters (like Jane’s) who they believe are poorly developed. I started out really enjoying the novel but by page 400 was beginning to appreciate those criticisms. The book was getting heavy to hold and I wondered whether the amount of detail did anything to increase my understanding of the characters. Still I would judge it an enjoyable read, but definitely not for everybody.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was just my cup of 'Yorkshire' tea as I was able to immerse myself in a drama played out over 20 years in the life of two Sheffield families, The Glovers and the Sellars.
And what years they were as the book opens in 1974 when coal strikes are causing havoc in communities with power cuts and Bernie Sellars relocates from London to the North due to his job in management with the Yorkshire Electricity Board. The family includes his wife Alice , teenage daughter Sandra and son Francis.
Across the road in the suburban estate are the Glovers including father Malcolm, mother Katherine and children Daniel, Jane and Tim. We have met the Glovers in an opening chapter as Katharine hosts a party complete with cheese and sausages on a stick and vol au vents, just before the Sellars arrive.
The subsequent chapter where the removal van finally puts the family in the new home was a brilliant piece of writing with a comic set piece involving Tim's snake which had me laughing out loud but was at the same time bitter sweet as it presages the familial crises that will dominate the next twenty years and events occur which will haunt the players until the children emerge as adults and their parents move into their later years.
The book moves to 1984 during the midst of the miners strike which tears communities apart in the Industrial North and then into 1994 as we follow the fates of the individuals.
I really liked this book and the 700 pages flew by as I followed every twist and turn of the individual lives. This book was so carefully crafted so you can see how incidents which seem innocuous or funny can fester and have consequences never imagined 20 years on.
Definitely one of my favourite books this year and I'd recommend it for any reader who wants to enjoy a good family drama.

[Mark Landmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I kept on moving this book down on my queue just because of its length, but in the end I zipped through it. Despite its length there were hardly any sections where my mind drifted and I didn't ever want to miss a single word. I can really see why reviewers here are comparing the book to Franzen... I almost wish I hadn't read that before because I found myself comparing as I went through the book, and usually finding this book not quite measuring up, though I don't really feel like that anymore now that I'm finished. I think what they have in common is a number of central characters in one or (in this case) two families, and a story that is told from different characters' points of view. And the authors have the most amazing ability to write good dialogue... I think that was my favourite part of The Northern Clemency - I loved the entirely credible but multi-layered and conflicted (and sometimes playful) conversations between the characters, like between Daniel and Helen. I think one difference was the time span of this book - because the book spans many years I sometimes felt like the story had to be told as a series of vignettes. And at first I thought that would bother me. But they're pieced together so smoothly that it doesn't feel choppy at all, even though I think certain storylines have to be picked up and dropped in order to make it work. But now that I'm finished I'm feeling the loss of these people (characters) that I spent the last days with and I'm sorry my time with them is over.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you had asked me a week ago if I liked this book, I would have groaned and rolled my eyes. I completely stalled about 35% of the way into the book. I stalled there for about a month by reading other books and entire issues of the LA Times, unable to commit to finishing the Northern Clemency. Then with a quiet weekend of time, I picked it up again and within an hour or so, I was hooked into the rhythm of Hensher's story - a rhythm that totally eluded me earlier.

The story mainly follows the lives of two suburban, middle-class British families. The life stories of the neighborhood are told from the perspectives of the parents, children and neighbors. A perverse sense of dread lay over the childrens' school years (the reason I didn't dive into this book, undoubtedly). Things - some significant, some insignificant - happen to parents and children that mark their later lives. What hooked me was the realization that Hencher was going to try and trace those marks on their lives. I was intrigued to discover whether he'd issue comeuppances, karma, redemption or judgments. Not to spoil the reading for others - let's just say that he didn't share the contempt for his characters that Jonathan Franzen demonstrated in Freedom (reviewed here earlier). The author showed heart - so much so that when I came to the end I was a bit saddened to leave Sheffield at last.

[Natali · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not enjoy this book. I endured it because I read somewhere that it was one of the most popular books on Amazon a few months back and because it was the first book I had chosen to read on my Kindle. I can't understand why it was ever published in the first place, let alone popular. And reading it on the Kindle was agony because it just went on and on and on and on. I've never been so glad to finish a book in my life.

At first I thought that I simply couldn't relate to the British archetypes but that wasn't it. I did rather enjoy the English turn of phrase such as "salad cream," or "codswallop," or "fish pie." But other than the foreign novelty, the archetypes are universal because the book is about two middle class families in an industrial English town. It is a mundane explanation of common human interaction and there is virtually NO plot, drama, or action. The characters are not even likable, much less interesting. If this book is noir, it is lost on me.

The only silver lining to having read this book is that every book I read on my Kindle from here on out will seem like a breeze.

[Larry H · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I saw that Amazon had named this their best book of 2008, I absolutely had to read it. And I'm so glad I did. This is a BIG book--600 pages long--and it's a sweeping story that primarily centers around two generations of two families. But don't let that slight description steer you away from reading the book. This story is fascinating, compelling, funny, frustrating, a bit heartbreaking and life-affirming, all in one package. True, there is a lot to wade through. But it's well worth it.

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book about several families whose lives intersect, between London and Sheffield, an industrial (coal) city. We move through early childhood to mature adulthood of several of the characters, and although it's a little tough sometimes to keep the names straight, it is possible with a little bit of extra attention. The writing is fantastic and sometimes so elegant you just want to read a sentence again because it is so well said. Lots of irony and sarcasm, my favorite kind of humor, so it has humor but is not at all flippant.

[Geoff Wooldridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Northern Clemency by Philip Henscher was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2008, ultimately beaten for that award by Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (which I loved).

It is a simple, yet lengthy, tale of two families living in the northern town of Sheffield, England, spanning two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, the times of Thatcher and Major.

The Sellers family - father Bernie, mother Alice and children Sandra (later to become Alexandra) and Francis, move from London to Sheffield for Bernie to take up a promotional position in the electricity supply company he works for (the 'Electric').

They settle into a house directly across the road from the Glover family - father Malcolm, mother Katherine, and children Daniel, Jane and Timothy and, over time, the lives of these families become enmeshed in the normal way that neighbours often do.

The time span of the novel allows each family to mature, as the parents age and transition towards retirement, and the children develop from schoolchildren to adulthood, each with their own version of adult relationships.

The narrative deals with each of the characters at various phases and defining moments of their lives, both the good times and those that are more challenging, while focusing on relatively normal family issues and concerns.

For example, the Glover marriage is tested when Katherine becomes infatuated with her new boss, the owner of a florist shop, who is not all that he seems to be.

Bernie is successful and popular in his job, and eventually retires and feels lost. Alice is content with life, until she suffers from a tragic medical episode.

The girls in each family move away from Sheffield, Jane to London and Sandra to Australia (where she decides to call herself Alexandra or Alex). Francis also moves to London.

Daniel, after a succession of girlfriends, finally settles on Helen, and together they establish a successful restaurant/dance studio, in partnership with Helen's parents who love 'the Latin'.

Timothy, or Tim, always a troubled and troublesome child, delves into radical politics, becoming a protester and agitator, but eventually gains university qualifications and becomes a lecturer, while retaining his strongly Marxist sympathies.

Tim visits Sandra in Australia, which leads to one of the darker highlights of the novel.

The sheer brilliance of this novel lies in its banality, the ordinary lives of ordinary families in an ordinary place, all described in exquisite detail in beautiful and precise prose.

Nothing seems forced of fake, and the dialogue, including some featuring northern English accents, seems spot on and credible. Each of the characters in this yarn is interesting in their own way.

While this is not an overtly political novel, the conservative politics of the day does feature in parts, particularly the Thatcher inspired coal strikes of the 1980s.

Put simply, this is a bloody good read, beautifully conceived and executed, and might have given it a full 5 stars if it hadn't waned just a little in the middle stages. So, I'm calling it 4.5 stars and saying 'strongly recommended'.

[David Gagen · Rating 3 out of 5]

At over 700 pages this is a big novel. There were many times I was swept up in the lives of these characters, set mostly in Sheffield during the Thatcher years. I was at times completely absorbed. There is so much engrossing detail here, examining these lives in such a microscopic way it seems. And then about page 500, I realised this wasn't going anywhere, I didn't need to know every pathetic boring thing that happened during every minute of every day. I could just watch any soap opera on TV for that. And as expected the conclusion goes nowhere, with nothing resolved. For such a great writer, you think Hensher could have fashioned a less meandering, more focused novel with these interesting characters. Oh, and get a better editor to remove a third of these pages. Gee, Days Of Our Lives will be on in half an hour, I wonder if they've caught the Hill Side strangler yet!

[Nigel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling novel focussing on the trials and tribulations of two middle class families living in Sheffield from the seveties to the nineties. The period and place is nicely captured with big events such as the miners' strike rumbling on in the background but the emphasis is mainly on the domestic interactions and it is all the better for this. One gets wrapped up in the characters' everyday problems so that the 738 pages seem to fly by.

[Katherine Houlston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got most of the way through this before I realised I had already read it, think that says a lot about it! Whilst the characters and their daily lives were entertaining to a degree and it was an easy book to read at the end of the day, I just wasn’t sure what the point of it all was, did I miss something? I think it could have benefited from some serious editing to pull out the more interesting plot lines and to develop the characters who had something different to say.

[Veronica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow Philip Hensher has managed to pass me by up to now, but when I read a review of this novel and discovered it's set in Sheffield during the 1970s, I couldn't resist. It's billed as a state-of-the-nation saga on a Tolstoyan scale, following the fate of two families, the Sellers and the Glovers, from 1974 to 1994. It's certainly Tolstoyan in size, weighing in at a hefty 736 pages, but it lacked the historical sweep of Tolstoy. Tolstoy sets the minutiae of his characters' lives in the wider historical context with lots of references to major current events, and, in War and Peace, intersperses the action with long philosophical disquisitions. Hensher doesn't do any of that -- he focuses (very well) on the characters' daily lives, and the way they grow and change while remaining recognisably the same people.

All the same, I found it a bit baffling that they barely seem to notice the Falklands war, and apart from one character, a student radical, the miners' strike and collapse of Sheffield's industry brushes lightly by them. But at least Hensher manages to convey the atmosphere of an era without stuffing his narrative with brand names, the way David Mitchell did in Black Swan Green. He also very noticeably shuns the popular device of using music to situate the characters. In a rather supercilious and self-serving essay about state-of-the-nation novels published in Prospect, he says snottily: "I was a teenager when the Clash are reported by Coe as playing in Fulham. I wouldn't have cared. At the time, my records were mostly of Mahler, Schoenberg and Boulez." I'm rather glad I read this after I'd finished the novel, so I wasn't put off by his condescending tone when writing about authors like Jonathan Coe and Sebastian Faulks.

But he writes well, and he can convey emotion and character wonderfully; two scenes that stood out for me were the one where Katherine Glover returns home after being arrested by the police in connection with fraud by the owner of the Broomhill florist shop she works in, and a compellingly creepy scene where Sandra Sellers meets her secret admirer Tim Glover twenty years later. So I did enjoy it, and it's worth reading -- he just does himself a disservice by comparing his work to Tolstoy, because his strength is precisely in the mundane details of ordinary lives. Looking at his backlist, he appears to be startlingly versatile.

But the defining state-of-the-nation novel for me is still Jonathan Coe's What a Carve-Up And I even thought Tim Lott's Rumours of a Hurricane did a better job of summing up the change of mentalities during the 80s. Read this for the characters rather than the period atmosphere. And take his views of Jonathan Coe with a pinch of salt.

[jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a brilliant book. It's one of those wonderfully crafted books that goes so far into human nature, into the pieces of atypical, illogical behavior that, despite their strangeness, are still universally sympathetic. Set over two decades in Sheffield, UK, it follows two families through the events and non-events of their lives. It also gives a true insight into the lives of the coal miners and the social conditions that surrounded the decline of the mines, and the onset of the Thatcher era. I found this book to be beautifully crafted, yet emotionally raw in places - especially in the themes related to sex, or to the petty cruelties children impose on each other. It is more character driven than plot driven, although as the plots do pick up, it does move faster and faster from the 1970s to the 1990s.

This is a universal book about the minute, everyday lives of people in northern England in the latter half of the 20th century, in a rapidly homogeonizing country, and a changing, globalizing world (which is contrasted, in places, against the unchanging nature of the moors). I also realized, after I finished it, that the characters of the older generation that are in their mid to late 30s at the book's opening would have been of the same generation as my father. And I thought, so that's what would have happened to Dad if he hadn't emigrated. He might have ended up living an everyday life in a suburb of Carlisle, much like the neighborhoods of Sheffield, where he would have been challenged to hang on to his livelihood as the region's industries were privatized and shut down. Also, his children wouldn't have had the opportunities and the drive that my sister and I, growing up on American capitalism, had. And maybe that's what I found slightly depressing about the book - the lack of vision in all the characters. What, after all, is there to be visionary about in the suburbs of Northern England in the Thatcher era? Hensher turns those visions inward, and focuses them on the everyday movements, and that's what made this book so fascinating.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Disappointing.