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The Northern Clemency | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Hensher
Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £17.99
Buy New: £8.99
You Save: £9.00 (50%)
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Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 395
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 736
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 2.4
ISBN: 0007174799
EAN: 9780007174799
ASIN: 0007174799
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
An ambitious novelist who attempts something on as broad canvas as Philip Hensher does here is a rarity – add to that a fastidious attention to period (i.e. 1970s) detail, and – most daunting of all – a large panoply of points of view, shared among several protagonists. But in The Northern Clemency, Hensher accomplishes all of that – and more – with both precision and panache.Essentially, this is an (upmarket) family saga, detailing the lives of a pair of families who live on opposite sides of a street in Sheffield in the 1970s, bringing to life a host of characters whose problems – and ultimate destines – both disturb and move the reader. Philip Hensher couches all of this in prose that performs a fascinating balancing act: it is as descriptive and nuanced as one might wish, but it is also extremely refined -- in the sense that there is nary a wasted word; everything here absolutely justifies its place, and Hensher suggests to the careful reader that he has lavished the most forensic of attention on the craft of his novel. Perhaps the perfect audience for The Northern Clemency is the modern reader who has lamented that contemporary fiction lacks the heft and reach of the great novelists of the past. Such a reader will find that a taste for the substantial is more than fulfilled by Hensher’s highly accomplished saga. --Barry Forshaw
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 That's Life November 16, 2008
Foggy Tewsday
"Inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth century Russian novels," it says on the cover blurb. Well, I can't say whether or not `The Northern Clemency' lives up to this expectation because I haven't read much Russian literature, nineteenth century or otherwise. However, this novel is certainly an epic read as we follow the lives of two families who live in the same street in Sheffield over the best part of two decades.
So, is this novel a family saga? An upmarket soap opera? I suppose the answers to both these questions is yes. Sort of. It's a saga, but its sheer bulk marks it apart from the more conventional familial fiction that is currently fashionable. And I suppose in some ways `The Northern Clemency' could be thought of as a bookish soap opera although, in my opinion, without the froth. If you like your fiction to tie up all the loose ends in a story, then this book will probably not appeal to you. Similarly, if you're more of a reader of novels with clear plot lines that carry through to a dramatic conclusion, you may also want to give this a miss. However, if you enjoy stories about people, the way they interact, the way they live their lives, and you're not the sort of reader who will find himself or herself huffing and puffing after 200 pages, wondering where this is all leading, then this novel could well be something that you'd enjoy.
Philip Hensher's storytelling reminded me of Raymond Carver at times, particularly when his characters' mundane lives explode into moments of emotional stress. The ordinariness of a family moving into their new house suddenly becoming all the more memorable when the mother of one of the neighbours discovers that her son has secretly acquired a pet snake. Already angered and humiliated by the disappearance of her husband, Katherine violently kills the snake in front of her new neighbours and those prying eyes already enjoying the spectacle from the comfort of their own homes.
There are no chapter markers in this novel, but it is split into five sections. Characters and events overlap via numerous vignettes. I particularly enjoyed the scenes of the young Francis newly arrived in Sheffield from London dealing with the awkwardness of starting at a new school. Perhaps the most interesting character is Tim Glover, he of the secret snake. His later life sneering and snarling his way through the red mist of left-wing politics as he and his cronies operate as agitators during the miners' strike give the novel some added punch.
The writing is excellent throughout, but if you do decide to read this novel, be prepared to devote a lot of time to it and don't expect a standard beginning, middle and end scenario. For all its lack of rigid structure, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
 More like a tv soap than a novel... November 16, 2008
Lawyer Girl (Northants, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was a soap in print. It went on and on about the lives of people living on one particular street in Sheffield in the seventies running right through to what must have been the 1990s.
As you can imagine, covering that many life stories takes some doing. Hensher's book is over 700 pages long! You have to be really committed to get to the end. My problem was that because it took so long, I'd forgotten who was who by the end of it. People kept popping up, who I knew had been introduced at a convenient party at the beginning, but I just could not remember who they were. I had particular trouble with one of the main characters, Tim, whose age I could never quite work out. At one point I was sure he was supposed to be the same age as the boy over the road, 8, but a few pages later he seemed to be 11!
Much like a soap, the majority of the book is about the rather dull intricacies of everyday life. Then there are the cliff-hanger style sections - adultery, drugs, death etc, but these are pretty few and far between, and often a bit far-fetched. The book really lacked the pace to keep the reader interested.
All in all this was an interesting enough look at life in Sheffield in the recent past, but it really was too long. If you like your soaps you might enjoy this one, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.
 Less gormless than it appears November 15, 2008
Steve Benner (Lancaster, UK)
"The Northern Clemency" by Philip Hensher is an oddity, that's for sure. Following the doings (or, more accurately, non-doings) of a couple of families living in suburban Sheffield from the early 1970s into the 1990s, it is presented almost as a stream of consciousness, hopping from person to person or family to family as it follows its own particular narrative threads from scene to scene. It is hard to really grasp just who (or what) is meant to be at the centre of this epic rambling tale. Perhaps it's not so much the characters, or the places themselves, so much as the periods, especially the mid 70s and also the Thatcher years (especially the period of the Miners' Strike) which are quite effectively evoked, although sometimes a little out in the fine details.
The book is organised as just five chapters (or four and a half, if you take the author's numbering literally) which together span a massive 700-odd pages of narrative, with the action largely centred in Sheffield but also spilling out into London and, in the later pages, Sydney, Australia. Although born in London, Hensher himself spent his school and adolescent years in Sheffield at about the time portrayed in the first part of this book and it is easy to believe that some of this may indeed be semi-autobiographical. If so, one cannot help feeling that the author's memory is rather less than perfect, though, and also that the story is influenced as much by literary expedience as it is by actual experience. Parts of the tale are, if not wholly surreal, then nevertheless somewhat dream-like and much of it left me feeling very unsettled indeed. And while I recognised some aspects of the places and times in which I also grew up, there are also large chunks which are entirely unfamiliar to me and which I simply do not recognise at all. Or else are simply too stereotyped to be believable as anything other than cyphers.
Ultimately, I suspect, the book is about nothing so much as the ordinariness of everyday people (pointed up through the unstated but implicit observation that even "ordinary" people can have something quite extra-ordinary about them if only one looks carefully enough). And although nothing much really happens in this book (and some of the happenings are left frustratingly unresolved, or else simply fizzle out in unexpected and disappointing ways) it is easy to be drawn in and to be drawn along with the flow, simply to experience that flow, rather than out of any great desire to carried somewhere in particular.
Which, I suppose, makes it a lot like life itself.
 Oh dear, oh dear....... November 14, 2008
R. Lawson (Sheffield, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I recently reviewed 'The Hour I First Believed' by Wally Lamb, which was a huge meandering book which brought together a variety of different threads all conspiring to affect the main characters over a long period of time, and was quite superb. This book is similar in it's scope, but fails miserably. The first 400 pages or so are sort of vaguely Alan Bennet background about life up north; but without the sharp observation, the wit, or the entertaining prose. It just drones on about not much, setting the scene. After that, from time to time the author seems to try a bit of plot. Reapeatedly he tries a new story line, gets so far and then it seems to fizzle out. Not much happens. It fails to happen to quite a lot of people over quite a lot of time. No conclusion is really reached. It takes quite a lot of pages to tell us what didn't happen. We learn nothing in the end. Dire.
Despite its merits, frustrating and not the Sheffield I knew. November 14, 2008
DRJ Sayer (UK)
I read Northern Clemency as I had lived and enjoyed living in Sheffield during some of the period when the book was set. However, while it is a beautifully written book it does not portray the feisty impassioned place I remember. The book does not have the momentum to maintain its length and I did not understand its structure - no chapters, but we jump around seemingly in and out of people heads often with no warning. The story covers two families from the 1970's through the 1980's and the 1990's. It has a cast of incidental caricatures who meander though the story (which I found very difficult to follow). The main caricatures are unremarkable members of a stereotypical middle class Yorkshire family the Glovers, and the family of the new deputy manager of a power plant in Sheffield - the Sellers who have moved up from London to take this job.
Sheffield, and the north is famous for the `gritty working class drama' covered in different artistic genre, the Full Monty or more generally Billy Elliot and Brassed Off deal with living in northern towns and villages through the minors strikes, the collapse of the steel industry and its aftermath. As a result there is room for a topical book dealing with the middle classes, and there is potential to deal with important issues like the unsettled relationship between northern and southern families in a period of social unrest. However, this book is not it. It enforces the 'grim up north' stereotype and fails to extend the story to the post-devastation dynamism of a town which has seen outstanding development, new business, as well as the replacement of hard industry with retail, IT, and two very successful Universities. As a result it could just have easily have been set in Tunbridge Wells or Coventry. The Sheffield I knew and know is not in this book even if the places were familiar, so despite its merits simply ending the story in 1998 left the rest of the story untold, adding to my growing sense of frustration and subsequently my 2 star rating.
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