The Country Book

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: IF YOU LOVED (HATED) "THE CORRECTIONS", YOU'LL LOVE (HATE) THIS.

OK. Let's get the whole rating thing out of the way right now. Objectively speaking, this is a three-star book. But I enjoyed it very much - and read all 600 pages in about a day and a half. Which I think deserves some acknowledgement. There are many, many books that are far superior to "The Northern Clemency", but are way less fun to read. So I'm giving it 4 stars.

Here is an example of Philip Hensher in action as a critic. Writing about James Thackara's "The Book of Kings"

it's terrible. Startlingly badly written, with no apparent understanding of what drives people or how people relate or talk to each other, it is a book of gigantic, hopeless awfulness. You read it to a constant, internal muttering of 'Oh - God - Thackara - please, don't - no - oh, God, just listen to this rubbish'. It's so awful, it's not even funny. There is not one decent sentence in the book, nothing but falsity and a useless sincerity. It may be the very worst novel I have ever read.

Which has no bearing at all on my review; I just thought you might enjoy reading it.


Aspects of The Northern Clemency that I liked:

It's a sprawling portrait of two families, spanning the period from 1974 to about 1994. Yes, that's right: the Thatcher years.
Hensher is really terrific at capturing the dynamics of relationships within a family.
He can be very funny for long stretches.
He can also write very movingly about intra-family tensions and loyalties.
With one glaring exception, the characters are believable, and he keeps us interested, even though the events of their lives, objectively viewed, are pretty mundane.
So if you like a nice, generation-spanning family drama that's a 'good read', The Northern Clemency definitely has something to offer.

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't warn you that:

The book is way too long. At 600 pages, it's a bit of a doorstopper, and it cries out for editing on every page. If one of the characters gets a drink, expect to be told the height, weight, hair color and demeanor of the bartender, as well as what he's wearing. Somewhere around page 500, we spend four pages in the company of a woman called Rosalie, we learn about her relationships with her heroin-addicted son, with the different security guards in the building where she cleans offices at night, with the late-shift supervisor, Brendan, her nosy neighbors etc. Rosalie has grit and is a survivor. But the only function she serves in moving the action along is to pass along something she reads in one of the main character's recycling bins. Which told us nothing we didn't already know anyway.

Don't even get Hensher started on anything food-related. The description of a fish pie can run to two pages. Canapes and appetizers receive similar attention, bordering on the fetishistic. Hensher's disdain for the use of easy cultural references, such as pop songs, to evoke a particular point in time is on record. Apparently it doesn't bother him to use vol-au-vents, shag carpeting, and specific TV programs to do the same thing.

Although the book is set in Sheffield, against the backdrop of the miners' strike and Thatcher's response, there is no political commentary of any depth. To be fair, Hensher may wish to make the (valid) point that even during periods of (relative) political turmoil, the interest and engagement of the upper middle class was virtually nil. But his development of Tim, the troubled youngest kid in one of the families as a caricature Trotskyite who is laden with every tired cliche in the book is unforgivable. And boring.

Baffling title.

Occasionally, the plot just meanders into a completely implausible digression. This didn't bother me particularly, as Hensher generally manages to keep things entertaining, and is often very funny.

What can I say? I enjoyed The Northern Clemency a lot, warts and all.