Where the Protagonist Is Time
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction Where the Protagonist Is Time By Brooke Allen Philip Hensher, the 43-year-old British novelist who has won a Somerset Maugham Award and been a Man Booker Prize runner-up, is an...
...Glover said, frankly holding out a potato wrapped in foil, spiked with miniature assemblages of cheese and pineapple, wee cold sausages iced with fat...
...Bernie and Alice, whose marriage on the whole has been smoother than that of their neighbors, nevertheless depend much on silence to maintain harmony...
...For most of their lives together, it had seemed to [Malcolm] that he was admitted only to the public downstairs rooms of Katherine 's mind...
...The waters, long before, had been harnessed to power forges, small hammering enclaves in dells...
...Those who cannot forgive others, like Tim and his repulsive wife, are ultimately lost...
...Whether this inability is intrinsic or is brought out by the careless cruelty of one's parents is a question Hensher leaves unanswered...
...Tim is an unappealing boy and was an unappealing baby: "He'd been terribly thin, and his aged ugly face, like a gnome's or a changeling's, was one not even a mother, as it proved could love___There was [a photo] of him being christened...
...Tim proves never able to transcend his inauspicious beginning...
...Hensher is not condescending, however...
...So many things changed during that period: marriage, women's roles, food décor...
...We first come across teenaged Daniel ogling the women at his mother's cocktail party and doing little to conceal his erection...
...Across the road 16-year-old Daniel Glover entertains a string of girlfriends, while plain Jane escapes her surroundings by reading novels and poetry...
...Consider the loving sociological care of the opening scene, a drinks party at the Glover family home: “‘Nibble?’ Mrs...
...An epochal event in Sheffield’s past, the strike has only an oblique effect on the lives of these local people coping with the daily dramas of family life...
...Marriage in the '70s seems to have been a more repressed affair than it became later on...
...His first novel was set in Vienna, his second in the House of Commons, his third in 1980s Berlin, and his fourth in 19th-century Afghanistan...
...The novel starts with Harold Wilson at the country's helm and ends with John Major at No...
...As in the real world the evolution of a character initially seems surprising, then inevitable...
...Sheffield itself is as vivid a character as any in the book— andas changeable, and as beloved by the author...
...Malcolm is apprehensive about this bold act...
...The Northern Clemency is a historical novel, and like all such works has to balance historical incidents and the private doings of its characters...
...It is more concerned with the long-term effects of time's passage than with plot and incident...
...The Sellerses have recently moved there from London so that Bernie could take a job as deputy manager of a power plant...
...She hadn't quite got round to it with the elder two, but with Tim, for some reason, she'd got it into her head as Malcolm had expressed it, that he ought to be 'done.' Perhaps she thought that someone ought to love him, and it might as well be God...
...10 Downing Street, but it is the Iron Lady who permeates the Zeitgeist...
...He sees with a traveler’s magpie eye, sifting through observed material for the significant cultural detail, and is capable of applying his outsider’s vision to both domestic and more exotic venues...
...All this is apparent in his new book, The Northern Clemency (Knopf, 597 pp., $26.95), a dense epic novel set in Hensher’s native city of Sheffield, England, between the mid1970s and the ’90s...
...They had all dressed, but she had made the most effort for her own party...
...Katherine 's ill-advised infatuation with him sets off a domestic earthquake whose aftershocks are still felt by the Glover family 20 years on...
...In his spare time he participates in a battle re-creation society, dressing up as a cavalier or roundhead and endlessly replaying the battles of Naseby and Marsden Moor...
...In retrospect we can see 197494 as a discrete period the Thatcher era (never mind that Margaret Thatcher was prime minister only from 1979-90...
...And the title...
...The sight of her on television confronting Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, was emblematic: "Malcolm wondered and not for the first time, which of them got through more Elnett to keep their hair in place...
...Again, while this seems to be authorial condescension, we quickly come to recognize Malcolm’s hobby for what it is: a manifestation of real intellectual yearning...
...A decade later he is an estate agent, a little too handsome and smooth but, we begin to understand not really such a bad fellow...
...The more intimate spaces and speculations, the whole upstairs and attics of her thinking were kept from him...
...Clemency, in the world he has re-created for us, is the most valuable gift we can bestow...
...He wrote his Ph.D...
...This, too, seems to stem from the author's affection for Sheffield his sense of it as a healing, benign spot...
...Parents, after all, are imperfect, and they deserve forgiveness too...
...The Coronation Chicken, vol-au-vents and miniature quiches Katherine serves in the first scene are brought back, with heavy irony, on "Seventies Nights" at Daniel's restaurant in the 1990s...
...To hear that her father has "given up" on her is heartbreaking—despite our realizing, upon looking back, that the roots of Bernie's resignation took hold as early as the book's opening chapter...
...Yet public and private affairs are linked, though the associations are not always immediately clear to the reader...
...Hensher himself forgives his characters...
...The child sees an ugly place, the author a glorious one...
...In 1974, when Francis first observes it, the city is reaching the end of its industrial heyday...
...Their father, Malcolm, works at a building company...
...On Fiction Where the Protagonist Is Time By Brooke Allen Philip Hensher, the 43-year-old British novelist who has won a Somerset Maugham Award and been a Man Booker Prize runner-up, is an author of many interests...
...he unhappy people are those who fail to evolve...
...But it would be wrong to suggest Hensher has constructed a tight narrative, with each event acting as a catalyst for the next one...
...By 1994 he is plump, stately, happily settled down, and the prop of his in-laws' old age...
...Complex and murky situations suddenly clarify, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories beloved by young Francis Sellers: Francis “loved the way the world, so baffling and meaningless at the beginning of each story, fell into place before Sherlock Holmes, so wonderful a reader of facts that everything made sense to him, everything under the most disparate and unnarrated surfaces...
...Fourteen-year-old Sandra broods sullenly and exposes her breasts to stray boys, while innocent 10-year-old Francis observes the action uneasily...
...On the contrary, The Northern Clemency is diffuse and expansive...
...Even Alzheimer's patients, a hospital nurse informs Bernie, can name Mrs...
...The provincial, northern couples of this novel did not experience the sexual revolution that was sweeping the metropolis...
...His wife, Alice, is a stay-at-home mother, as were most middle-class women of her generation...
...The shop turns out to be a front for laundering heroin money...
...At first glimpse this seems like the condescending antinostalgia we have encountered in a number of recent American novels (has any decade, ever, seemed more retrospectively ridiculous than the ’70s...
...Just as Napoleon’s Hundred Days and the Battle of Waterloo loom over Vanity Fair, so the 1984 Miners’ Strike looms over Hensher’s two interlinked families, the Glovers and the Sellerses...
...The strangely unlovable and unloving Tim pores obsessively over books about snakes...
...The real protagonist of The Northern Clemency is time, though, not any of its characters...
...he loves even the most unsavory of them, as a good novelist must...
...Sandra Sellers, too, moves beyond redemption...
...he correctly sees it as a reflection of some dangerous restlessness in her nature...
...And the job, an innocuous enough post as assistant in an upmarket flower shop, does indeed prove treacherous...
...Her hair was swept up and pulled in, in a chignon and ringlets...
...The novel’s two principal families are bourgeois on the rise, living in a housing development that, at the tale’s opening in 1974, is only 10 years old and considered rather upscale...
...When he finally confronts his loveless nature and his loveless life, he is faced with a blank wall of emotional failure...
...Thatcher as prime minister...
...the steel masters had built their works, outgrowing the forces of the rivers, and the city had locked its blaze and fire inside those huge blank buildings, rising up on either side of those narrow streets like cliffs___The city had been made by fire out ofwater...
...Alice and Katherine struggle with the boredom of staying at home, and Jane sets out on a professional life as a matter of course—a successful one, yet perhaps not much more interesting than her mother's...
...its good-looking manager, Nick, is an unscrupulous character...
...he is simply concerned with getting the background exactly right...
...Jane, too, follows an unexpected but finally natural trajectory...
...He becomes a political radical of the most doctrinaire and bitter sort and embarks on a joyless marriage with one of his kind...
...Malcolm's office, in the same two decades, goes from cozy-shabby to cold clean lines and awkward glass partitions...
...dissertation on 18thcentury English art...
...Malcolm's historical interests are not shared by Katherine, his bored wife, who takes the unusual step of getting a job outside the home...
Vol. 91 • November 2008 • No. 6
