In 2003, Philip Hensher was named to Granta magazine’s prestigious list of "Best Young British Novelists." His latest novel, The Northern Clemency, was short-listed for Britain’s Man Booker Prize and named Amazon.com’s "Best Book of the Year" for 2008. Hensher’s previous work includes The Mulberry Empire, The Fit, Kitchen Venom, and Pleasured.
The Story: Two middle-class families embodying "reserve and restraint, the usual conditions of an English life" become neighbors in Thatcher-era Sheffield, England, 150 miles outside London. The Glovers’ lives are complicated by a passionless marriage and wife Katherine’s work for a local florist. The Sellers, who move from London so that husband Bernie can begin his duties with the electric company, discover many common bonds with their new acquaintances—children, boring meals, politics, the 1984 miners’ strike, and forays into London and to Sydney, Australia. The novel’s five sections span generations and two decades—and include some surprising developments regarding the couples’ children. Thus, Hensher’s intricate social study becomes complete.
Knopf. 597 pages. $26.95. ISBN: 1400044480
Washington Post
"This absorbing portrait of a large group of people invites comparison to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections or Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, but Hensher is a gentler satirist and treats his characters more tenderly. Indeed, he writes with such illuminating attention to the flutterings of everyday hope and despair that you come away from these pages feeling like a more insightful person." Ron Charles
Christian Science Monitor
"[The Northern Clemency] is so precisely rendered, one can easily imagine it becoming required reading for set designers everywhere. … [The novel] is big and detailed enough to call Dickensian—except that Dickens tried everything except charades and semaphore to make certain the audience got his message loud and clear." Yvonne Zipp
New York Times
"Though it is in some ways as opaque as its title, The Northern Clemency creates a piercingly insightful group portrait. There is dazzling hyperrealism in Mr. Hensher’s descriptive powers." Janet Maslin
Seattle Times
"While the book, on its surface, appears to be an old-fashioned novel—symphonic in scale, almost Victorian in its dense detail—it also recalls the experiments of Virginia Woolf (especially The Years) with its multiple leaps in time and shifts in point of view. … That’s how it creates, with sumptuous thoroughness, a whole world." Michael Upchurch
Wall Street Journal
"Mr. Hensher provides plenty of action, but he embeds it in the atmosphere and rhythms of quotidian existence. … Readers should not be put off by the novel’s bulk or its slow beginning and leisurely pace; nor should they be disappointed by its ending with a kind of dying fall." Martin Rubin
NY Times Book Review
"Hensher is obviously thoroughly versed in literary history, but he’s writing at a moment—as lovers of literary history know—when a lot of authors choose to keep their influences well-disguised. … Despite all the twists and turns (each beautifully set up and delivered), there are no surprises; this is a book that seems to have been written too many times already." Sophie Gee
St. Petersburg Times
"Striving to locate the tiny joys and cruelties of family life, Hensher seems unable to see the wood for the trees. There are well-written scenes in a novel that fails to convey anything substantial." Vikram Johri
Critical Summary
Philip Hensher has been compared to Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, Ian McEwan, and Virginia Woolf, among other respected literary writers, living and dead. No pressure there. For all its grounding in the classics—past and present—Hensher’s latest novel elicits the sort of ambivalence from critics that often accompanies such sprawling tomes (Janet Maslin, for instance, calls the book "overlong, but … relentlessly enveloping"). Most critics agree that Hensher’s skills as a stylist and observer are prodigious and that this is an important book, a reader’s book; still, some bristle at the author’s staid, deliberately paced portrait. Hensher’s star burns quite a bit brighter in London than in the States, but Northern Clemency might be his introduction to a broader audience.