THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY
by Philip Hensher
Harper Perennial - $26.99
Reviewed by David Hill

The paperback edition of last year's 700-plus page Man Booker shortlist novel is set mostly in Sheffield, from the Thatcher 1970s onwards.
It's a time of miners' strikes and social distress, when individual lives, local industry and urban traditions are being wrenched apart, and Hensher tells us ... well, he tells us surprisingly little about such things.
That's mainly because the protagonists are middle-class suburbanites, for whom iron mills and coal mines are alien worlds. Their lives are more concerned with living room suites and what nibbles to serve at neighbourhood parties. Daniel Glover grows from sneering adolescence to comfortable early middle age as a restaurateur, barely registering that his trendy eatery was once an industrial site.

It's people, not politics that interest Hensher. They're a hard-working, sometimes faceless lot, though Daniel does break out into tango dancing, and younger brother Tim rips a blouse before meeting a damp end. Mind you, Tim has been traumatised since his Mum stomped his pet snake to death and the girl next door got him to undo her bra.

Local and period colour abounds. Revisit 1970s gold-tasselled sofas, mushroom vol-aux-vents, women in beehive hairdos, men in vivid blue suits with flares, Jackie magazine for girls, white-painted wall units, small boys wearing bow ties to birthday parties. We hear a great deal about food. And about local architecture and drainage.
You have to call it "sprawling". Some parts feel dictated rather than written. Breakfast arrangements for a house-moving team take three pages; getting a cup of coffee takes four. Sydney Harbour, when one character visits, means a whole tourist essay. Then there's buttering the cat's paws ...

The author is always present, and can't leave a tone unturned: "... she said in a not exactly unfriendly way"; "now she was surely being deliberately childish".
Hensher is excellent on the camouflages of family life, the feral cruelty of kids, the quotidian compromises of adulthood, and the meshings or jostlings of class structure. But he doesn't seem sure whether this is thriller, bildungsroman, moral fable or social comedy. Almost by default, he appears to have settled for epic, in ambition if not in execution. And I do mean "a tone unturned". Sorry.

David Hill is a Taranaki writer

David Hill's review was first published in the NZ Herald's Canvas magazine on Saturday 14 November and is reproduced here by kind permission of Linda Herrick, Arts & Books editor,
NZ Herald