Author: Philip Hensher

Knopf, 2008

Best ebook deal: Public library

The Northern Clemency is the sprawling kind of novel, following two English families and dozens of characters over several decades, and for more than 600 pages. It’s well rendered and beautifully written, missing a sense of real urgency but trading that for breadth and realism.

Clemency opens with a fantastic scene at a suburban cocktail party, full of neurotic characters, dysfunction, and weirdness. Hensher exudes the sense of authority possessed only by great writers. Put yourself in my hands, he says, and trust me to show you something.

What he shows you is a wide slice of (mundane) real life. People have affairs, their husbands leave, they fight with their children, their daughters turn vegetarian, and later they turn back. Their children deal with bullies, friends, sexual awkwardness. As those children grow up, they look for apartments, roommates, jobs, and love.

Hensher dives deeply into the ordinariness of his characters’ lives, and watching his exploration is often amusing, but it can never be called gripping.

There are moments, about half a dozen in the novel, when a terrific plot point came along that gave me the chills, and the pages started to fall away. Unfortunately, each time, just as I was renegotiating my bedtime, the tension evaporated almost as quickly as it appeared.

Whenever there’s a shocking occurrence, there’s a careful omission of its repercussions; people forget quickly. Whenever there’s a conflict brewing, it arrives with a whimper and nobody gets too worked up. If there’s a proper fight, people make up quickly, or forget it. There are sometimes consequences for actions in this novel, but only years later, in memories and echoes, as characters think about that girl who lived across the road, and what she did that one afternoon. It’s always thinking; they never talk about their memories, not even years later.

Also, Hensher often excruciatingly stretches out the buildup to coming conflicts by laboring through minute unrelated details. At one point, we take an agonizing tour of a house, and catch up with some old acquaintances, and indulge in no end of small talk—all while the character we’re following girds his loins to confront a crime boss. Finally, the confrontation comes and goes, all is well. Nothing, I began to realize, was ever in jeopardy.

I understood, by halfway through, that nothing too terrible will ever happen to these people and that they’ll never be affected by their lives. Ostensibly, this tactic is an effort to highlight and defamiliarize the ordinariness of daily life; in reality, it serves merely to suck the remaining drama out of what few conflicts there are.

The Northern Clemency is, however, beautifully, masterfully written. The narrator dips into the head of every major character the story concerns, while maintaining a steady stream of rich prose.

There are those who think that a third person narrator closely following a character should take on the diction and language of that character; As I Lay Dying is the archetypal example of that kind of voice work. The narrator of Clemency, however, is a storyteller, not a ventriloquist: the narrative sounds about the same in the perspective of the 12-year-old snake enthusiast as it does in the perspective of his middle-aged banker father.

Despite the steady diction, Hensher gets insightfully, if sometimes only briefly, into the minds of each of his characters. He draws them with great care and spends the majority of the time in one character’s head or another. This is, after all, a novel of characters, and their personalities make up its substance moreso than their interactions; thoughts are more important to Hensher than actions.

Ultimately, this is not a novel you gobble down in a week; it’s a novel you sit with, and read slowly over time. So read it, by all means, it’s worth it. Just don’t expect to be kept up past your bedtime.

Similar books: The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen; To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf; Little Children, by Tom Perotta; As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner