The Northern Clemency

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction

Some books pull you so deep inside the lives of nonexistent people that you have to shake yourself when you come up for air in real life again. Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency is one of those.

The story begins in 1974, as Katherine Glover throws a cocktail party for her neighbors in the northern English coal town of Sheffield. It’s a slightly unusual social occasion for the street, so everyone except the teenagers has on their party manners.

What they don’t know (and the reader gradually learns) is that their hostess’s bright chattiness is because she has invited Nick, her boss at the flower shop, with whom she is infatuated. And their host’s gentle but equally artificial pleasantness is because he believes that Katherine has taken Nick for a lover.

The way Hensher skims among the thoughts of the party guests and hints at the complicated relationships in the Glover family should set you right up for this rich, sympathetic, comic and tragic novel.

Things become more beautifully complicated right away, as new neighbors, the Sellers family from London, move in across the way. The potential friendship between the two women is staggered by an odd act of rage in the party’s aftermath. The relationships between the children are even quirkier. Hensher vividly conveys the intensity of their lives, from young Tim Glover’s obsessive passion for snakes to teenaged Sandra Sellers’ cynical friendship with the too-good-looking teen swain Daniel Glover.

Hensher shifts from viewpoint to viewpoint with the same sense of swimming ease as in that initial cocktail scene. Then the whole story slides forward by several years, and there’s a whole new set of complications. The novel covers roughly the twenty years of Thatcher’s England, and the social and economic changes of that period are reflected in the lives of the characters.

It’s gorgeously done. The vivid period setting must be even more powerful for English readers (it’s Coronation Chicken and vol-au-vents at the cocktail party, rather than, say, chicken á la king and Chex party mix), but it’s a joy for American readers, too.

Be forewarned: Hensher pulls things up rather sharply at the end, reminding the reader that realistic fiction is fiction, not real. But that just serves to show what an astonishing work of imagination the novel is. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.