by Philip Hensher

What do other people think of you? That question, and its sometimes brutal answer, is always floating just below the surface of Philip Hensher’s two-family saga, The Northern Clemency. The Glovers open the novel with a late-summer party at their suburban Sheffield home, which mother Katherine has organized as an excuse to invite over her new boss. While he doesn’t come, all the neighbors do, and Katherine’s middle class instincts to be impressive and sophisticated wear thin from the outset. What was she thinking to have her children present—one guest “had left her son, nineteen, a worry, at home; she thought the party might have been smarter than it was, not knowing the Glovers.” Why on earth didn’t the group move outside, to the garden, on a warm summer evening? And why wasn’t the party arranged for two weeks later, when everyone could meet the new neighbors?

That new family, the Sellerses, is enough to give a judgmental thrill to the whole neighborhood. Anthea Arbuthnot, the street’s primary busybody, finagled an introduction through the real estate agent. Jane Glover, fourteen, “already. . .hated the girl, over the road,” upon hearing of her existence. Tim Glover, the youngest child, felt the same way about his own Sellers counterpart as soon as he laid eyes on him. And the Sellerses are not immune; after witnessing a horrific scene by a stressed and bad-tempered Katherine they are convinced for several months that the Glovers are completely mad.

For the reader, nearly everyone is mad. At first we think young Tim is quiet, sensitive, shy. At the party he hides behind the sofa reading—“his favourite place when there was anyone in the house.” But when Francis Sellers meets him at school, he is weird, unnerving, and violent enough to seriously harm another child physically and later torture him emotionally. Sandra Sellers is by turns a cynical and tough teenager, one of the more likable characters when seen through her own eyes, and an absurd exhibitionist, described as “mental” by the movers and foolish enough to touch off bizarre sexual delusions in Tim. And Katherine, incapable of feeling embarrassment herself while continually inducing it in her audience, is blind to her own infatuations and mistakes and never realizes how poor a job she does keeping up appearances.

All thoroughly ordinary problems, of course, and Hensher follows the threads of some dozen life stories from the early 1970s (occasionally backtracking to courtships and marriages in the 1950s) through the mid-1990s, with appropriate nods to Thatcherism and the miners’ strike. Characters are picked up and dropped, some to become more important and better understood later, others to languish and remain, if at all, only through the filter of someone else’s story. The frustration of a favorite character going missing is almost inevitable, and Sandra, probably the most interesting and unusual of the bunch, disappears for a decade to the other side of the world. Large spans of time are skipped entirely, and while it’s easy to get up to speed there is a slight feeling of unevenness.

Hensher has a feel for the details of mundane existence, and the reader grows close to the characters almost through a shared sense of banality. At times it may be a bridge too far—does hair “the shining colour of cold tea” look different from hair the color of hot tea? Can an unidentified Middle Eastern language really be described as “labial”? But generally Hensher succeeds at capturing what James Wood calls the “inevitable surplus” of lifelike detail.

When Bernie Sellers is ready to take early retirement, his wife Alice begins to worry. She has spent her entire adult life quietly amusing herself during the day: ten minutes on the exercise bike; minor gardening; trying out new recipes, new moisturizers, new face-packs; casual reading; “unassuming activities [that] could be compressed into ten or twenty seconds of explaining at the end of the day.” What will he do to fill the days?

Bernie was filling his time as best he could, being cheerful about it, and it seemed to be her who was forced by his retirement to wonder what, if anything, her life had ever consisted of. Nothing much. Bernie went uncomplainingly through the motions of what, after all, had been her daily existence, and for him, painfully obviously, the emptiness of it was nearly unendurable. Perhaps it ought to have been so for her.”

It is not so for the reader, who, as Daniel Glover puts it to his wife, has been reading a book “sort of about people like us, I think.” People like us do “nothing much”; they go to work, raise their children, worry about their family life, and tend the garden. In the hands of an unafraid author like Hensher, that “nothing much” can go from depressing to joyous to horrific to laughable. And it can be arresting enough to get us caught up, as Daniel was, in “memory, in a block, six inches by four by two.”

Reviewed by Nicole Perrin

The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Knopf, 2008
Cloth, 597 pp, $26.95
ISBN-10: 1400044480