The northern clemency

by Philip Hensher. Knopf, 2008.

A big thick tome, which was short-listed for the 2008 Booker Prize, which might be enough to put people off reading it, but aha, local readers are in for a surprise. The bulk of this novel is set in Sheffield, England in the 1970s and 80s, but 620 pages later, the action shifts to the Manly we know and love. Is this the first time Manly has appeared in a Booker-shortlisted novel? Sydney is affectionately described, with a gee-whiz air that suggests that Hensher must have been over here for only a few days. Without wanting to give it away, the novel’s ending seems to have confused some English reviewers, who mistook the action of a tidal rip for the attack of a shark. Where were the life-savers??

Other reviews thought that the novel was too long, but shorter books can sometimes take longer to read, and this one flows pretty smoothly. It treads similar ground to Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, or Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-pool Library, and is not inferior to either of those, only slightly soapier somehow. There would have to be a lot of the author’s childhood on display here, in among the melodrama.

- John.