The Northern Clemency - Couverture souple

So the garden of number eighty-four is nothing more than a sort of playground for all the kids of the neighbourhood?”

“I wouldn’t say all,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. “I would have said it was only the Glovers’ children.”

“All of them?” Mrs. Warner—Karen, now—said. “The girl seems so quiet. It’s the elder boy, really.”

“I’ve seen the girl going in there too,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. “It’s during the day with her. She’s on her own generally. I grant you, it’s the older boy who goes in after dark, and he’s got people with him. Girls, one at a time. There’ll be trouble with both those boys.”

“But, Mrs. . . .” Mr. Warner said. He was slow to catch people’s names.

“Call me Anthea,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. “Now that we’ve finally met.”

“I mean, Anthea,” Mr. Warner said, “why doesn’t anyone tell the parents? They surely can’t know.”

“That I don’t understand,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. She was stately, forty-six, divorced, at number ninety-three, almost opposite the empty house. “This isn’t the best opportunity, I dare say.”

They were at the Glovers’. It was a party; the neighbourhood had been invited. Most had been puzzled by the invitation, knowing the couple and their three children only by sight. Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Warner had passed the time of day on occasion. They had arrived more or less at the same time; both had the habit, at a party, of moving swiftly to the back wall the better to watch arrivals. They had made common ground, and Mrs. Warner’s husband had been introduced. He worked for the local council in a position of some authority.

It was a Friday night in August. The room was filling up, in a slightly bemused way; the neighbours, nervously boastful, were exchanging compliments about each other’s gardens; conver?sations about motor-cars were running their usual course.

“It’s a nice thing for her to do,” Mrs. Warner said, who always prided herself on thinking the best of others. She had left her son, nineteen, a worry, at home; she thought the party might have been smarter than it was, not knowing the Glovers. Other people’s children had come.

“She’s a nice woman, I believe,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said, who had her own private names for almost everyone in the room, the Warners, the Glovers included. “It’s a shame she couldn’t have waited a week or two, though.”

“Yes?” Mr. Warner said, who believed that if a thing could be done today, it shouldn’t be put off until tomorrow.

“There’s new people moving into number eighty-four,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. “It might have been nice to introduce them to everyone. They’re moving in next week.”

“Just opposite Anthea’s,” Mrs. Warner explained to her husband.

“Perhaps it wasn’t ideal,” Mr. Warner said. “From the point of view of dates.”

“People are busy in August, these days,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. “They go away, don’t they?”

“We were thinking about the Algarve,” Mrs. Warner said.

“Oh, the Algarve,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said, encouraging and patronizing as a magazine.

It was a good party, like other parties. Mrs. Glover was in a long dress: pale blue and high at the neck, it clung to her; on it were printed the names of capital cities. In vain, Mrs. Warner ran her eyes over it, looking for the name of the Algarve, but it was not there.

“Nibble?” Mrs. Glover said, frankly holding out a potato wrapped in foil, spiked with miniature assemblages of cheese and pineapple, wee cold sausages iced with fat. Her hair was swept up and pulled in, in a chignon and ringlets. They had all dressed, but she had made the most effort for her own party.

“I so like your unit,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said.

“We got fed up with the old sideboard,” Mrs. Glover said. “It was Malcolm’s mother’s, so he felt he had to take it when she went into a home. She couldn’t have all her things, naturally, so we took it, and then one day, I just looked at it and it just seemed so ugly I had to get rid of it. We got the unit from Cole’s, actually.”

“You got it in Sheffield?” Mrs. Arbuthnot said.

“I know,” Mrs. Glover said. “I saw it and I fell in love with it.”

“It’s very nice,” Mrs. Warner said. “I like old things, too.”

“I know what you mean,” Katherine Glover said. “I love them, really. I just think they have so much more character than new furniture. I’d love to live in an old house.”

There was a pause.

“But it’s original, isn’t it?” Mr. Warner said, helping her out; they seemed to be stuck on the white unit, windowed with brown smoked glass.

“Yes,” Katherine Glover said. She gestured around the room. “I think we’ve got it looking quite nice now. Finally!”

They all laughed.

“We’ve lived here for ten years!” she said vivaciously, as if hoping for another laugh. “But—”

Karen Warner remarked that it was strange how you didn’t get to meet your neighbours properly, these days.

“This was a nice idea,” Mr. Warner said, “having a party like this.” But he was wondering why, on this warm August night, the party was staying indoors and not moving out on to the patio.

There were five of them, the Glovers, in the room. Malcolm was in a suit, a borderline vivid blue, waisted and flaring about his skinny hips, flaring more modestly about the ankles, his tie a fat cushion at his neck. He carried a bottle from group to group, his smile illuminating as he moved on. “My wife’s idea,” he was saying to a new couple about the party. “I work in the Huddersfield and Harrogate.”

“You work in Harrogate?” the man said. “That’s quite a drive every day.”

“No,” Malcolm said, after a heavy pause. “The Huddersfield and Harrogate.”

“The building society?” the woman said. She was a nursery nurse, pregnant herself.

“Yes,” Malcolm said, his puzzled voice rising. “Yes, the Huddersfield and Harrogate, our main offices, just off Fargate opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral. It’s women like parties, mostly. It was my wife’s idea.”

“It was a nice idea,” the husband said. “We’ve not met a lot of people in the street.”

“We’ve admired your front garden,” the wife said. She sneezed.

“The idea was,” Malcolm said, “that by now there’d be new people in number eighty-four. Just over there. They’d have been more than welcome.”

“That’s a nice thought,” the woman said, sneezing again.

“But there must have been a hold-up,” Malcolm said. “At any rate, it’s still empty.”

Elsewhere in the room, people were talking about the empty house, and about the new inhabitants.

“Anthea Arbuthnot’s met them,” a man was saying.

“Oh, Anthea,” a woman replied, and laughed. “What she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.”

“We call her the Rayfield Avenue Clarion,” someone’s teenage daughter said, and blushed.

“I was saying,” the man said, “Anthea Arbuthnot’s met them,” as Mrs. Arbuthnot came up, expertly balancing a pastry case filled with mushroom sauce.

“Met who?” Mrs. Arbuthnot said.

“The new people,” he said. “Over the road.”

“You don’t miss much,” she said, in a not exactly unfriendly way. “Yes, I met them, quite by chance. The house, it’s being sold by Eadon Lockwood and Riddle, which sold me my house too, five years back. It was the same lady, which is quite a coinci?dence. Her name’s Mary, she breeds chocolate Labradors in her spare time, which was a little bond between us, a nice lady. I saw her coming out of the house one day with a couple as I was going down the road with Paddy, my dog, you know, and stopped to say hello. Naturally she introduced me to the people, they’d bought it by then, they were just having another look over. Measuring up for curtains and carpets, I dare say.”

The Glover girl, Jane, was at the edge of their circle, listening, her flowery print frock, her lank hair, the empty plate she had been carrying round the guests all drooping listlessly. The adults shifted politely, smiling. She was fourteen or so; just about old enough for this sort of thing. “Are they nice?” she said.

Mrs. Arbuthnot laughed, not at all kindly. Jane Glover just looked at her, waiting for the answer. “Are they nice?” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. “I don’t know about that. They’re from London. He’s very London. She didn’t say anything much. They’ve got two children, nine, and a fourteen-year-old girl, I think she said.”

“Were the children nice?” Jane said, and now she was surely being deliberately childish.

“They weren’t there,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. “Their name—let me see—it’s on the tip of my tongue . . . they’re called—Mr. and Mrs. Sellers. That’s it.”

“London children,” a man said, shaking his head.

“I hope they’re nice,” Jane said, and then just walked away. She knew all...

“Relentlessly enveloping . . . Dazzling . . . The Northern Clemency creates a piercingly insightful group portrait . . . Why was it one of the most plausible nominees for this year’s Man Booker Prize (and arguably a much better choice than The White Tiger, this year’s flashy winner)? Why is it the best book of 2008, according to the editors of Amazon.com? The answer hides in plain sight. This is a book that can artfully encapsulate the whole state of the Glover family in a single unappetizing culinary image . . . Hensher is apt to be an instant hit with American audiences.”
–New York Times

“In 2003, Granta magazine included Hensher on their list of 'Best Young British Novelists' along with the now famous Monica Ali and Zadie Smith. The Northern Clemency thoroughly justifies his place in that Olympian group . . . 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. That’s all we ask from the best books of the year . . . Startlingly perceptive.”
–Washington Post Book World

“Anyone who thinks that the English novel has lost its ability to inhabit sprawling, meaty tomes, as in the days of yore, might want to take note of The Northern Clemency . . . A richly textured, closely observed saga . . . Hensher provides plenty of action, but he embeds it in the atmosphere and rhythms of quotidian existence. There is an aspect of social history to the novel that reminds one of Mrs. Gaskell or even Dickens . . . Searing.”
–Wall Street Journal

Praise from the UK:

“The Northern Clemency is a tremendous book . . . Philip Hensher has composed not so much a condition-of-England as a condition-of-humanity novel, which is gripping and surprising and shocking in all kinds of unpredictable ways, and enormously wide in psychological and moral scope. What a writer he is!”
–Philip Pullman

“Philip Hensher’s new book shows that the epic, exciting, deeply engaged novel of society is not dead in England. The book has all the blessings of art, with the pulse of what Henry James called ‘felt life’ at the centre of its moral adventures.”
–Andrew O’Hagan, author of Our Fathers

“This is the most absorbing and enjoyable novel I’ve read since the heyday of A.S. Byatt . . . Such is Hensher’s wit and humanity and so rich in detail is his crowded canvas, we soon realize that the novel is indeed a modern epic . . . You won’t want to skip a single sentence. It strides along, packed with cherishable observations.”
–Sunday Express

“Brilliantly styled . . . Hensher is fascinatingly good on how social transformation manifests itself in the textures, colours and manners of a culture . . . The Northern Clemency is not only extremely funny, but also deeply humane. [It] is a virtuoso display of sympathy: Hensher seems to dwell as easily and evocatively in the mind-world of a 10-year-old schoolboy as in that of a 59-year-old stroke victim or a middle-aged estate agent.”
–Sunday Times

“A remarkable novel . . . As emotionally engaged as political satire and as compulsively readable as a saga . . . But while Hensher's technical virtuosity is remarkable and his ability to conjure anything from a front room to an entire era equally striking, something more than brilliant cleverness makes this novel extraordinary . . . At the heart of the elegant narrative architecture, the fine comic timing and exuberant detail, there flickers a sense that generosity, a sense of others, is the best we can do. And at the last, in a twist as shocking as tragedy, that modest hope is beautifully fulfilled . . . Dazzling.”
–Sunday Telegraph

“An engrossing and hugely impressive novel . . . Hensher is a brilliant anatomist of familial tension and marshals his large cast of characters deftly. He has an impeccable eye for nuances of character and setting, and the details of Seventies food and decor are lovingly done.”
–The Times

“The Northern Clemency is a terrific novel–a truly fine achievement . . . It is a tribute to Hensher’s powers of invention that this saga becomes so involving that no detail is too small. And Hensher is at his brilliant best in the details.”
–New Statesman

“An early contender for novel of the year . . . Hensher presents the great drama and inexhaustible wonder of ordinary life . . . The novel is beautifully organised at three levels–close up, at the level of the sentence, further back, at the level of narrative progress, and then overall, as a fully realised whole–but its most impressive feature is that it manages to be a page-turner while eschewing the traditional devices we associate with such a book.”
–Spectator

“What is particularly enjoyable as the reader relaxes into this book is the portrayal of the complexity of family life: the layers, secrets and misunderstandings, the drama of different lives lived under the same roof, by people who are both strangers and kin . . . The novel provides an enjoyable nostalgia fest as well as an acute cultural history of provincial England . . . Engrossing, amusing and moving.”
–Independent

“Beautifully written . . . as impressive in its scope as in the effortless artistry of the language. Its characters are well-defined and plausible, while the narrative is leavened with deftly observed humour that gently pokes its lower-middle-class protagonists in the ribs . . . The plot charges along and boasts some supremely assured dialogue . . . Occasionally earthy and always entertaining.”
–Scotland on Sunday

“Like life, The Northern Clemency consists of many overlapping, intersecting and interdependent smaller plots, which are both individually and collectively enthralling, sometimes sad, and often very funny . . . Hensher doesn’t labour the period detail, and the reader is soon absorbed into the everyday but engrossing lives of his characters.”
–Daily Telegraph

“A fluent and immensely readable piece of work, sustained by a pleasure in its details . . . There is a timelessness about Hensher’s vision that is quite unusual these days, suggesting a quietly desperate but stable Englishness that carries on unchanged beneath a surface that is slowly becoming a little more glitzy, a little richer . . . Hensher’s strength is in the subtlety of his character development.”
–Irish Times