The Northern Clemency
Philip Hensher Fourth Estate, 738pp, £17.99
Only in English could the word clever be pejorative. Something - is it simple envy? - in our national psyche makes us distrust cleverness, rather than aspire to it; we see it as a taint, not a gift. It is often given as the reason why Gordon Brown is not more popular. A national treasure such as Stephen Fry can be forgiven his cleverness, because we know he has mental health issues, but cleverness unaccompanied by confession of emotional frailty just won't do.
This presents a problem for Philip Hensher. An accomplished critic, he makes no secret of the width of his cultural interests and seems to relish sticking his head above the parapet of prevailing opinion. (In the furore accompanying publication of Martin Amis's The Second Plane, Hensher declined to join in the taunts of the critical mob. While the press generally denounced Amis for being arrogant and anti-Muslim, Hensher declared there to be "something noble" about the book.) He also writes fiction. His last two novels, The Mulberry Empire and The Fit, were full of pastiche and postmodernist trickery. He is clever and he doesn't care who knows it.
It takes a special kind of complacence, also, to produce very long novels. The Mulberry Empire, about Britain's first Afghan war (1838-42), was some 560 pages long; The Northern Clemency has a whopping 738 pages. Only a very confident writer could make such exhausting demands on the reader's time and patience. To be able to sustain our interest, a book of such length has to be very, very good indeed. Happily, The Northern Clemency is just that.
This is a good old-fashioned story about two Sheffield families, beginning in 1974 and spanning 20 years. On a neat private housing estate on the edge of the moors, the Glovers and the Sellerses live opposite each other. Mr Glover works for a building society, while his wife helps out at a florist; Mr Sellers works for the electricity board. Over the years, we come to know almost everything about these people and their children. We are witness to their sexual awakenings and habits, their friendships and quarrels, their soft furnishings and the plants in their gardens, even what they have for supper. It is a tribute to Hensher's powers of invention that this saga becomes so involving that no detail is too small.
And Hensher is at his brilliant best in the details: "the vol-au-vents were flaking, soft and clothy"; an orange and black 1970s carpet has "a slight marshy suck"; a tablecloth is "padded beneath, yielding slightly when pressed". Almost my favourite sentence in the book is: "Her son, nineteen, a disappointment, lay at full length on the sofa."
Gradual shifts in the characters' sensibilities reflect the changing times. People become less insular, more selfish, less loyal as time goes on, while around them council houses are sold off, commodities privatised, industrial redundancy pay invested in leisure consumerism. The miners' strike of 1984 is at the centre of the book, dividing some families and bringing others closer together. The scene in which the Glovers' newly radicalised youngest son shouts: "Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!" during a conversation is very funny.
Hensher does not nail his political colours to the mast, but wryly indicates that student Marxism may not be the wise choice.
There is a string of set pieces, some of them shocking: someone's Australian lodger dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation; someone's mum stamps a pet snake to death on the curb in front of their new neighbours; an associate visits a big-fish drug dealer in his crumbling country pile. But this is not really an action novel. It is about the surface of family life, but more than anything it is concerned with the internal life beneath that surface.
I was reminded of an early story by Jane Smiley in which a cuckolded husband goes to great lengths to avoid being left alone with his wife because, he rightly intuits, she wants to confess her adultery. While she doesn't know he knows, he reasons, he need do nothing: they may carry on their lives as normal. Knowledge, however, will demand action.
A similar conundrum faces several of the principal characters here. "I don't know why we've always got to discuss everything," one of them wails. Hundreds of pages later, another announces: "There's things that are best if no one says them even if everyone knows them . . . if you don't say something it can't become important."
This honesty, this reticence, is very moving. I wish Philip Hensher had had the nerve to allow his characters to be inarticulate without, as it were, winking at readers behind their backs. The Northern Clemency is a terrific novel - a truly fine achievement - but the postmodern touch es, albeit few (someone reads a long novel that starts with the same sentence as this book; one section is called "Book Two and a Half"), threaten its sincerity and the reader's pleasure. When you can write a book this good, you don't need to demonstrate how clever you are.
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