Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Philip Hensher
Harper Perennial 2009
This is the ideal book to take on holiday – as long as you have space for it (it’s 700+ pages long). There’s no danger you’ll get through it by Day Three, and, for me at least, it was absolutely engrossing. It tells the story of two Sheffield families through three snapshots taken at ten-yearly intervals from 1974. Alongside there is a large cast of minor characters, some of whom pop up and then disappear again, and some of whom then turn up much later, again for a brief walk-on part – much as in life itself. This can be frustrating, as there are inevitably loose ends, but it is convincing. The story of the two main families, taking as its pivot the miners’ strike in 1984, is, however, more fully developed. I found the long early section, dealing largely with childhood, the most satisfying, but the novel kept my interest throughout. There are a few gaffes (you can’t go on a canal holiday on the Norfolk Broads, for instance), and a number of proof-reading errors which really should have been ironed out for the paperback edition, and the little meta-fictional (is that what they call it?) twist at the end is just silly, but otherwise this is a warm, fascinating, realistic novel that I found difficult to put down. At one point Hensher mentions “those moments when .... the first experience of [a] place is rendered again with complete freshness, the lost flavour of newness imbuing a long known interior”. This kind of perceptive comment about something we’ve all experienced but which I, at least, have never seen written down before, is typical of this novel’s attention to detail and its realism. Excellent stuff.
6th May 2009
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth47
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