Book Reviews
THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY, By Philip Hensher
I came to this book prepared to be annoyed with it, mostly because of what struck me as the absurdly grandiose claim on its jacket that Philip Hensher was “inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels.”
The Northern Clemency was clearly long enough for that comparison, at more than 700 pages. But Tolstoy’s even fatter novels had vast subjects to match the number of pages: the nature of love, the nature of history, Napoleon marching on Moscow, suicides under trains. The first scene in this book, by contrast, showed an awkward suburban party in 1970s Sheffield, in which unfamiliar characters moved stiffly through a landscape of pebble-dashed respectability, eating vol-au-vents and Coronation chicken. It seemed unpromising by comparison.
These are buttoned-up, middle-class, characters, helpless with convention: the nosy neighbour who loves the Royal family always popping round, “just by chance”, when something’s up, the echoes of one mother’s not-quite affair with her boss, the failure to find words with which to be sincere, lawns growing, the military re-enactment society meeting, the terrors of the playground.
And yet, within a few pages, the reader finds himself utterly beguiled by the beautifully interwoven tales of the Sellers and Glover families, growing up in these quiet streets, and the touching tentativeness of their attempts to find out how best to live.
There’s more to the story than the personal. Even though the sedate Sheffield of this story is far removed from the city’s coalmines and slag-heaps, the 1983-4 miners’ strike, as time passes, and the children get older, does come fuzzily into view. It’s seen through the eyes of Bernie, a middle manager for the Electric, whose job is to buy in coal despite the strike; and Timothy, his neighbour’s peculiar son, the boy no one likes at school, who sells the radical rag Spartacist and joins the pickets. Sensed, even invoked from time to time, is Margaret Thatcher. Seen, eyeball to eyeball, in a (strangely unaffecting) account of the Battle of Orgreave, a clash between police and miners’ pickets, is Arthur Scargill.
Politics, however, mostly keeps its distance; if anything, this is social history, the texture of a time, a big picture emerging quietly through the detail. Hensher handles his big cast of characters deftly and with charm. He’s good at taking the reader in unexpected directions: suddenly moving on a decade here, or a city or country there, but with enough grace and unexpectedness about the plotting that the reader willingly follows each new change of direction and pace.
For anyone who, like me, grew up at the same time as this book’s 1980s teenagers, and remembers giving cans of beans to collections for the miners, in the same spirit of vague adolescent enthusiasm for slogans and fighting authority, Hensher has a quiet reproof.
The characters who make the political struggle the basis for their lives meet unattractive ends. Those who survive, and even, mutedly, prosper, are the hard-working, hopeful and humble.
Happiness, in Hensher’s novel, comes to those who draw other people together: the sharers, the generous, the kind. His successes are flexible enough to leave failure behind and find new happiness, accepting that whatever they do may always be less than perfect; but buoyed up, all the same, by knowing they love and are loved and will be forgiven. The coronation chicken and other period trappings are only a tease, it turns out. There’s a very Tolstoyan, uplifting, Levin-and-Kitty moral to this story after all.
Vanora Bennett’s next novel, Blood Royal, is published by HarperCollins in June 2009