FICTION: The Northern Clemency, By Philip Hensher, Fourth Estate, 738pp. £17.99 ENGLISH WRITER Philip Hensher is a busy man: a novelist, newspaper columnist, reviewer, academic, teacher, editor, musician, and judge on literary juries, he features on lists of both Britain's best young novelists and its 100 most influential gay people, writes Giles Newington.
With so much going on, you'd worry that the breezeblock-sized tome that is the 43-year-old's latest novel - his sixth - might show signs of haste or strain.
On the contrary, The Northern Clemency is a fluent and immensely readable piece of work, sustained by a pleasure in its details that suggests a strong personal element (Hensher, like the Sellers children in the book, was born in London but spent a good stretch of his childhood in Sheffield). Belying its author's waspish reputation, and also the blurb's hyperbolic invocation of the great 19th-century Russian novels, clemency (as in mildness) turns out to be the key word as this family saga begins to unfold at an unremarkable drinks party in middle-class Sheffield in 1974.
Without fuss, we are introduced to the hosts, the Glover family, and the other residents of their street, and invited to speculate with them about various absentees, including Katherine Glover's employer, Nick, and new neighbours, the Sellers family, who are late arriving in the north from their native London. They are relocating so that Bernie, the father, can take up a promotion. The party, though superficially sedate, is the catalyst for a crisis in the Glovers' marriage, a crisis that reaches its climax just as the bemused Sellers clan finally make their belated appearance.
Thus is established a web of family and inter-family relationships, which the novel explores in the period up to the mid-1990s, pivoting (as does so much recent state-of-Britain fiction) on the miners' strike of 1984-1985, the convulsion that marked the end of the old industrial order. But unlike David Peace's visceral novel, GB84, or Alan Hollinghurst's more overtly political (and London-based) The Line of Beauty, this is unshowy storytelling that seems to have no radical agenda lurking beneath the text. Instead of upheaval, there is a timelessness about Hensher's vision that is quite unusual these days, suggesting a quietly desperate but stable Englishness that carries on unchanged beneath a surface that is slowly becoming a little more glitzy, a little richer.
BOTH THE MAIN families are conservative in outlook, and the likable Bernie Sellers, with his managerial job at the electricity board, is directly implicated in the miners' defeat. Tellingly, the only miner to be fleshed out in the narrative is opposed to the strike, and is liberated by his redundancy money to invest in the ballroom-dancing school he has always dreamed of opening. And the book's only entirely unredeemed character is the Glovers' younger son, Tim, a disturbed, snake-obsessed leftie activist, who never recovers from his infatuation with the Sellers's daughter, Sandra, and the trauma of the public humiliation his distressed mother puts him through in the opening section.
In a symphonic soap opera as long-running as this, there are inevitably storylines and themes that hold the interest more than others. The most successful are set up early, and resonate throughout. Katherine's frustration with her reticent husband, Malcolm (who likes dressing up as a Cavalier in recreations of English Civil War battles), leads her into a relationship with her shady new boss, Nick, who has opened a flower shop as a cover for less fragrant activities. Allowed by Hensher's omniscient eye to observe Nick's real story and motives, we understand better than Katherine the likely consequences of what she is getting herself into, and the disillusionment that will follow. Also good are the early sections about the Glover and Sellers children as they try to adjust to their parents' decisions and, in the case of Francis Sellers, to a new school where his teacher quickly targets him for being the southern softie he is.
Hensher's strength is in the subtlety of his character development: he doesn't pigeonhole anyone, and the long span of the story gives everyone the time they need to move from mystification to a level of self-awareness. For some, like Katherine, Malcolm and their eldest son, Daniel, uncertainty is a reason to cling more closely to the safety of family and respectability, despite the melancholy undertow this conformity brings with it.
THE SELLERS CHILDREN, meanwhile, are looking to escape. The creatively and sexually blocked Francis has a kind of epiphany on a train back to London after unburdening himself to his unconscious mother, while his selfish sister, Sandra, in the book's most joyful episode, decamps to Australia and finds herself almost hysterically happy to be in a more easy-going culture that allows her to forget past ties entirely.
This mellow, unpretentious novel is another surprise from a writer who flits between genres, from sprawling 19th-century adventure yarn in The Mulberry Empire to sex-and-politics satire in Kitchen Venom, to bite-sized surrealism in The Fit, and by the end it is still difficult to know quite where Hensher is coming from.
Enjoyable as sections of the book may be, there is something missing in this vision of England that prevents The Northern Clemency from living up to the grand sweep of its author's ambitions.
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Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist