Philip Hensher’s “The Northern Clemency” is very much about England, set in a city “made by fire out of water.” The primeval description refers to Sheffield, South Yorkshire, circa 1974, when the city was the steel center of England and heaps of coal fed the gaping furnaces of the factories and muddied the rolling, purplish landscape of the pensive moors.”The city made its money from steel; it was driven by its waters; it was built on coal.” Over the course of the novel, Sheffield hovers like a persistent haze, lovingly and forbiddingly evoked by turns, almost a character in itself.
Hensher’s human characters, though, are entrenched in a claustrophobic suburbia, a world of dull cocktail parties fed by vol-au-vents and nosy neighbors obsessed with the Queen. The residents of Rayfield Avenue are, for the most part, bored and dissatisfied, but none quite so much as Katharine Glover, the proverbial desperate housewife with three sullen children and a lifeless marriage. Katharine’s spontaneous decision to try for a job in a newly-opened flower shop triggers a disastrous train of events – her husband Malcolm, assuming she’s having an affair with her charismatic young boss, walks out of the house without a word and Katharine erroneously releases her dismay on her youngest son, Tim. The deeply disturbing scene in which she violently stamps on the head of his illicitly purchased pet snake haunts both Tim and the rest of the book through the final pages.
Each of the characters evolve, over a span of almost twenty years, in the shadow of England’s changing politics. There are frequent references to the regime of Margaret Thatcher, evocations of the crippling recession that took hold in the ’80s, and a brief but powerful portrayal of the coal miner’s strike that gripped the north of England in 1984.
I enjoyed Hensher’ detailed descriptions, his unusual metaphors and the precision with which he evoked a certain era — the minutae of everyday life was meticulously catalogued and really gave the reader a sense of time and place, from the description of a public swimming pool to careful mention of iced biscuits and tea in a local, gossip-ridden cafe. The characters, however, were harder to respond to. With a few exceptions, like depressed housewife Katharine and her over-sexed but compassionate son Daniel, I found most of the characters to be depressingly unlikeable. A few of the overlapping storylines were intriguing — surprisingly, I found the side-plot of florist/reluctant drug runner Nick Reynolds and his diabolically sleazy dealer fascinating — but a good deal of the characters left me cold. The most irritating were Sandra Sellers, the emotionally indifferent and destructively promiscuous daughter of the Glovers’ neighbors, and Tim Glover, an eerie child who grows into an annoyingly fervent Marxist, obsessed with Sandra to the point of creepy delusion. Even some of the more appealing characters felt distant and suffused in chilliness— throughout the novel, I felt almost as if they were deliberately held at arms’ length. This might have just been my reaction — another reader might find it easier to get close to them — but I ultimately found the city itself to be more compelling than the people who lived in it, the city made by fire out of water, that seemed to breathe on its own.
