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December 15, 2008

REVIEW: THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY

My review of Philip Hensher's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Northern Clemency has gone up at the Barnes & Noble Review.  It begins thus:

In hell, the old joke goes, the cooks are British. To be fair, British cuisine has come a long way -- today there are Michelin stars to be found in England. But in 1974, the year in which Philip Hensher's domestic epic, The Northern Clemency, opens, culinary times were bleak, indeed. Consider the menu on offer at Katherine Glover's cocktail party:

... pastry cases with mushroom filling, and prawn, she'd made three different quiches, she'd made Coronation Chicken (a challenge to eat standing), she'd made assemblages of cheese-and-pineapple and cold sausages, she'd made open Danish sandwiches in tiny squares, a magazine idea, and they were eating it all. There were dishes of crisps, too, and Twiglets, but those didn't count in the way of making an effort.


Coronation Chicken can best be described as a sort of curried chicken salad, and Twiglets are packaged, Marmite-flavored snacks shaped like twigs. As exotic (and revolting) as much of this might sound to American ears, food is just one of the many effective markers Hensher deploys to situate his sweeping story of lower-middle-class British life through the tumultuous period of industrial upheaval that climaxed with the 1984 miners' strike (best known to American audiences as the backdrop of Billy Elliott) and witnessed the transition from an industrial to a service-based economy.

The entire review can be read here.

Posted at 12:38 AM in Reviews |

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Comments

Andrew Deacon

Congratulation on the review, Mark - and let me assure you that it's not only Americans who are puzzled by words like 'mardy' - they don't mean much just across the Irish Sea, either. You may remember I tipped this book - and backed it - to win the Booker, but it lost out. Hensher was going for the Victorian state-of-the -nation type novel and I think he pulled it off. As for the dialect, if you can read Hardy you can read Hensher. The food is more foreign than the language - truly the past is another country when it comes to canapes.

Posted by: Andrew Deacon | December 15, 2008 at 03:57 AM

ed

"Subtleties of class -- a common theme of much British fiction -- are also explored here in ways that Americans might have trouble decoding."

Uh, no. And what does the Atlantic Ocean have to do with it? One of the big problems with this sprawling novel is that Hensher doesn't understand the way people beneath a certain income level operate. Clearly has no expertise or curiosity in the marginalized. And the novel, as a result, suffers from its Tolstoyian excesses. (Hensher does understand people above a certain middle-class threshold. And I suppose that if you're looking for a safe suburban novel that makes you feel smug and elitist, you can do no better than Hensher. But Mike Leigh or Richard Yates, or, hell, even Jonathan Franzen, this clearly isn't.)

Posted by: ed | December 15, 2008 at 06:21 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

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