Week 1: The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher

I realised too late how gripping a book about normality could be. It’s a long read at 700+ pages, and under the constraints of a week I rather skimmed through the start, waiting for the sort of major event that drives a plot forward dramatically. But the beauty of this text is the way that its ‘happenings’ - which we take to be some sort of theatrical performance or other - were so readily and recognisably drawn from the banalities of everyday life. It’s well crafted to make the ordinary beautiful and to give a cadence to life’s plain punctuation: taking the kids to school, family dinner round the table, kids becoming adults, first loves, first jobs, independence, marriage and towards the end, an increasing present sense of mortality. With this rise and fall played out panorama-style across kindred families of a Sheffield street, the book brilliant charts another life - that of the Thatcher government, which here draws out allegiences in unlikely places, and cuts divisions between the characters that you look forward to, as you can frankly see coming a mile off. With this hindsight, I didn’t give the first hundred pages justice. It was here that the wonderful nuances of character and subtleties of expression were probably first to be noticed. Perhaps, with the text written with such familiarity, so naturally, it was easy to skim through, in the same way that you can easily slip in and out of a conversation in real life. Here you somehow didn’t need to cling on to every word, yet by the end of the book I found myself wanting to. 4/5