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US Mall 1 - The Northern Clemency
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List Price: $26.95
Our Price: $15.85
Your Save: $ 11.10 ( 41% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Knopf
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781400044481
ISBN: 1400044480
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 608
Publication Date: 2008-10-30
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-10-30
Studio: Knopf
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Even ordinary lives can be fascinating
Comment: Despite some fairly obvious flaws, I enjoyed this book a lot. In particular, I read all 600 pages in under two days, which should give an idea of its appeal.
For me, its strengths were:
* It's a sprawling portrait of two (upper)middle-class English families, spanning a 20-year period, beginning in 1974, locating it firmly within Britain's Thatcher years. (I have a certain fondness for well-constructed family stories).
* Hensher is really terrific at capturing the dynamics of relationships within a family, as well as exploring his characters' inner lives.
* 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.
* The various story arcs are well-constructed, believable, with satisfying resolutions (with one exception).
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 could have been quite a bit shorter. At 600 pages, it cries out for editing. For instance, Hensley appears incapable of having one of his characters order a drink without telling us the height, weight, hair color and demeanor of the bartender, as well as what he's wearing. (There's a particularly egregious 4-page section later on in the book where an office cleaning lady, Rosalie, is introduced. 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. We learn that Rosalie has grit and is a survivor. But her only function in the story is to allow the reader a glimpse of something one of the main characters has thrown in her office wastebasket. And it's not even anything particularly revealing.)
* Then there's what appears to be a mild food obsession on Hensher's part. Description of a fish pie can run to two pages. Canapes and appetizers receive similar attention, bordering on the fetishistic.
* As a reviewer, Hensher has expressed his disdain for other authors' use of easy cultural references, such as pop songs, to evoke a particular point in time. He correctly identifies it as lazy writing. Apparently it doesn't bother him, in his own writing, to use vol-au-vents, shag carpeting, and the mention of very specific TV programs to do the exact 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 real 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 lazy and ultimately boring.
* Occasionally, the plot just meanders into a completely implausible digression - there are parts when the novel reflects the often undirected, aimless character of everyday life a little too faithfully. I must confess that this didn't bother me all that much, as Hensher generally manages to keep things entertaining, and often very funny, throughout.
I enjoyed "The Northern Clemency" a lot, warts and all, and found it compulsively readable. Readers who liked Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" should enjoy it; if you hated "The Corrections", give it a miss.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Ordinary lives....
Comment: This book was a bit hard to get into and you have to make an effort to sit down and get into it, but in the end it is worth the effort. It is the story who of two families that are neighbors in a Sheffield, England suburb-the Sellers and the Glovers. Over three decades, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s the book follows the day to day events of these two families, both the adults and the children. For some the minute of these seemingly ordinary events could be boring, but once I got into the story and the characters I was pulled in and found it an engaging read. It is not a book built around sex or violence, but the day to day lives of real people. What makes the book engaging is how the reader follows the lives of the characters and witnesses them progress, mature as their views change. For this reason the book maybe more interesting to those of us over forty, who have seen similar changes in ourselves; then again it would be a more important read for those under 30 so they know what to expect. The book is a bit long at over 700 pages and I did not like the structure of having no chapters, it made it hard to find a good stopping point; but maybe that was the authors point? Life offers no stopping point? Overall rating is a solid 4 stars.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Ordinary life made extraordinary
Comment: Don't let some of the words used to describe "The Northern Clemency," words like "epic," "rambling," or "stream of consciousness," discourage you from taking up this wonderful novel. It is none of these things. Certainly it is the complicated and intricate story of two English families, a story that is set mostly, but not entirely, in Sheffield, and extends from the Thatcher years to a time not far from the present. The members of the two families, the Sellerses and the Glovers, total nine characters, each of whom is gradually but fully developed, so the novel does, at first, feel like a Russian novel, except that there is no handy list of characters inside the front cover for consultation. So it's best to read this book when you have a little time, and slowly you'll be drawn in, until you can't put the book down. The novel does not ramble. It is intricately plotted, and even when it ranges as far abroad as Australia, its events seem natural and inevitable. As for "stream of consciousness," no, no, no. "Ulysses" it isn't---except in the sense that the writing is wonderful. In some ways, it will remind you of a John Updike novel in its evocation of the humble quotidian beauty of life in a suburb where people eat Coronation Chicken and fish pie, shop for groceries at the Gateway, and buy their children's school uniforms at Cole's. What's unusual about this novel is its sense of mystery. The two couples at the center of the novel, Katherine and Malcolm Glover and Alice and Bernie Sellers, have marriages that are complicated but somehow familiar in their arguments, joys, and disappointments. But who can account for the ways in which children spin away from their parents in ways unpredictable and strange? How do parents produce children whose only links to each other seem to be their last names and their DNA? It happens all the time, of course. With the phrase "So the garden" the ending of the novel circles back to its beginning. When I finished reading, I turned back to the opening pages, and in looking at the names of the characters, whose fate I now knew, I realized that I would read this book all over again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: interesting family drama during the Thatcher Era
Comment: In 1974, the Sellars brood leaves hip London for suburban ennui in Sheffield in the inappropriately named South Yorkshire as they trek to the north. The two Sellars sisters, reticent Francis and extroverted Sandra are concerned that life in the burbs will prove boring as the former loves music and the latter loves swinging London.
Their neighbors, the Glover family consists of two parents and three kids. Patriarch Malcolm is outraged when he finds evidence that his wife Katherine is having an affair. As for the children, bookworm Jane conceals from everyone she is writing a novel; Daniel's brain consists of one icon sex with any carbon bearing species; and the youngest preadolescent Tim is friendlier with snakes than people.
One decade later, the kids are away from home either at universities or working. The empty nest syndrome is compounded with employment issues for the older generation as their hobs die and the new economy begins to shape everyone. Into the nineties, the children as adults live around the world, but come home as often as they can seek solace.
This is an interesting family drama that showcases two families during the Thatcher Era. Each of the ensemble cast is fully developed as readers see them all from multiple perspectives. Although the story line is extremely passive, fans will relish this deep character study of two generations struggling in different ways to survive the Conservative period, a time of technology and dramatically changing globalization (Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat comes to mind although much of his treatise occurs after the events of THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY) in which the older generation feels hopelessly lost and left behind and their offspring disillusioned and unhappy.
Harriet Klausner
Customer Rating:
Summary: Less gormless than it seems
Comment: "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 the suburbs of the Northern England (former) steel-making city of 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 the characters, or the places themselves, so much as the periods, especially the mid 70s and also the Maggie 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Even ordinary lives can be fascinating
Comment: Despite some fairly obvious flaws, I enjoyed this book a lot. In particular, I read all 600 pages in under two days, which should give an idea of its appeal.
For me, its strengths were:
* It's a sprawling portrait of two (upper)middle-class English families, spanning a 20-year period, beginning in 1974, locating it firmly within Britain's Thatcher years. (I have a certain fondness for well-constructed family stories).
* Hensher is really terrific at capturing the dynamics of relationships within a family, as well as exploring his characters' inner lives.
* 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.
* The various story arcs are well-constructed, believable, with satisfying resolutions (with one exception).
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 could have been quite a bit shorter. At 600 pages, it cries out for editing. For instance, Hensley appears incapable of having one of his characters order a drink without telling us the height, weight, hair color and demeanor of the bartender, as well as what he's wearing. (There's a particularly egregious 4-page section later on in the book where an office cleaning lady, Rosalie, is introduced. 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. We learn that Rosalie has grit and is a survivor. But her only function in the story is to allow the reader a glimpse of something one of the main characters has thrown in her office wastebasket. And it's not even anything particularly revealing.)
* Then there's what appears to be a mild food obsession on Hensher's part. Description of a fish pie can run to two pages. Canapes and appetizers receive similar attention, bordering on the fetishistic.
* As a reviewer, Hensher has expressed his disdain for other authors' use of easy cultural references, such as pop songs, to evoke a particular point in time. He correctly identifies it as lazy writing. Apparently it doesn't bother him, in his own writing, to use vol-au-vents, shag carpeting, and the mention of very specific TV programs to do the exact 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 real 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 lazy and ultimately boring.
* Occasionally, the plot just meanders into a completely implausible digression - there are parts when the novel reflects the often undirected, aimless character of everyday life a little too faithfully. I must confess that this didn't bother me all that much, as Hensher generally manages to keep things entertaining, and often very funny, throughout.
I enjoyed "The Northern Clemency" a lot, warts and all, and found it compulsively readable. Readers who liked Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" should enjoy it; if you hated "The Corrections", give it a miss.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Ordinary lives....
Comment: This book was a bit hard to get into and you have to make an effort to sit down and get into it, but in the end it is worth the effort. It is the story who of two families that are neighbors in a Sheffield, England suburb-the Sellers and the Glovers. Over three decades, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s the book follows the day to day events of these two families, both the adults and the children. For some the minute of these seemingly ordinary events could be boring, but once I got into the story and the characters I was pulled in and found it an engaging read. It is not a book built around sex or violence, but the day to day lives of real people. What makes the book engaging is how the reader follows the lives of the characters and witnesses them progress, mature as their views change. For this reason the book maybe more interesting to those of us over forty, who have seen similar changes in ourselves; then again it would be a more important read for those under 30 so they know what to expect. The book is a bit long at over 700 pages and I did not like the structure of having no chapters, it made it hard to find a good stopping point; but maybe that was the authors point? Life offers no stopping point? Overall rating is a solid 4 stars.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Ordinary life made extraordinary
Comment: Don't let some of the words used to describe "The Northern Clemency," words like "epic," "rambling," or "stream of consciousness," discourage you from taking up this wonderful novel. It is none of these things. Certainly it is the complicated and intricate story of two English families, a story that is set mostly, but not entirely, in Sheffield, and extends from the Thatcher years to a time not far from the present. The members of the two families, the Sellerses and the Glovers, total nine characters, each of whom is gradually but fully developed, so the novel does, at first, feel like a Russian novel, except that there is no handy list of characters inside the front cover for consultation. So it's best to read this book when you have a little time, and slowly you'll be drawn in, until you can't put the book down. The novel does not ramble. It is intricately plotted, and even when it ranges as far abroad as Australia, its events seem natural and inevitable. As for "stream of consciousness," no, no, no. "Ulysses" it isn't---except in the sense that the writing is wonderful. In some ways, it will remind you of a John Updike novel in its evocation of the humble quotidian beauty of life in a suburb where people eat Coronation Chicken and fish pie, shop for groceries at the Gateway, and buy their children's school uniforms at Cole's. What's unusual about this novel is its sense of mystery. The two couples at the center of the novel, Katherine and Malcolm Glover and Alice and Bernie Sellers, have marriages that are complicated but somehow familiar in their arguments, joys, and disappointments. But who can account for the ways in which children spin away from their parents in ways unpredictable and strange? How do parents produce children whose only links to each other seem to be their last names and their DNA? It happens all the time, of course. With the phrase "So the garden" the ending of the novel circles back to its beginning. When I finished reading, I turned back to the opening pages, and in looking at the names of the characters, whose fate I now knew, I realized that I would read this book all over again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: interesting family drama during the Thatcher Era
Comment: In 1974, the Sellars brood leaves hip London for suburban ennui in Sheffield in the inappropriately named South Yorkshire as they trek to the north. The two Sellars sisters, reticent Francis and extroverted Sandra are concerned that life in the burbs will prove boring as the former loves music and the latter loves swinging London.
Their neighbors, the Glover family consists of two parents and three kids. Patriarch Malcolm is outraged when he finds evidence that his wife Katherine is having an affair. As for the children, bookworm Jane conceals from everyone she is writing a novel; Daniel's brain consists of one icon sex with any carbon bearing species; and the youngest preadolescent Tim is friendlier with snakes than people.
One decade later, the kids are away from home either at universities or working. The empty nest syndrome is compounded with employment issues for the older generation as their hobs die and the new economy begins to shape everyone. Into the nineties, the children as adults live around the world, but come home as often as they can seek solace.
This is an interesting family drama that showcases two families during the Thatcher Era. Each of the ensemble cast is fully developed as readers see them all from multiple perspectives. Although the story line is extremely passive, fans will relish this deep character study of two generations struggling in different ways to survive the Conservative period, a time of technology and dramatically changing globalization (Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat comes to mind although much of his treatise occurs after the events of THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY) in which the older generation feels hopelessly lost and left behind and their offspring disillusioned and unhappy.
Harriet Klausner
Customer Rating:
Summary: Less gormless than it seems
Comment: "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 the suburbs of the Northern England (former) steel-making city of 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 the characters, or the places themselves, so much as the periods, especially the mid 70s and also the Maggie 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.
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