Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency is a giant chunk of a book, about two middle-class families in Sheffield, England, and their lives over several decades, from the 1970s on. As the book opens, Malcolm Glover and his wife, Katherine, are having marital troubles. Malcolm suspects Katherine of having an affair, and he goes missing the same day Alice and Bernie Sellers move in across the street. The two families, awkwardly forced into immediate intimacy by Katherine’s emotional meltdown that first day, become intertwined, mainly through the friendships of their children: Daniel Glover, dashing ladies’ man, Jane Glover, shy and bookish, and Tim Glover, the weirdly intense youngest boy unloved even by his mother; and, across the street, awkward, wooden Francis and carefree, oversexed Sandra. The novel follows the fates of each of these people, as well as a half-dozen of their friends, lovers and acquaintances, and demonstrates how the events of that first day would have repercussions for all of them in the years to come. It also traces the changing fortunes of Sheffield, a coal-mining town in decline, whose children would soon flee to London and Australia.
The book has little in the way of driving plot (it’s more of a survey), but the characters and the settings are finely drawn, and I thought the book was a real page-turner, but then, I really dig this sort of boring, British, drawing-room-type stuff. Of course, any novel or film that makes a point of showing ordinary lives unfolding against a backdrop of historical events is sure to receive positive critical attention, and The Northern Clemency is no exception. Beautifully written and thoroughly absorbing, the book deserves its accolades. However, it continually teases at a plot-twist and resolution that never arrives, so if you’re not into this sort of thing, you’ll probably feel cheated by the time you wind up at page 600.
