Books & Poetry

This enormous novel luxuriates in its spaciousness, not by cramming in crowds of extras, but by allowing its unassuming protagonists to stretch and flex. Hensher has chosen the suburbs of Sheffield as the setting for his epic, and though his characters – the members of two neighbouring families, the Glovers and the Sellers – travel as far as London and in one case Australia, his focus never shifts far from the humdrum estate where everything (and nothing) happens.

Of the two clans, the Glovers are the more troubled clan: desperate housewife Katherine feels trapped and unloved, and attempts to assuage her yearnings with a job in a florist’s shop; her husband Malcolm is baffled, and suspicious that she is having an affair with her new boss. Their elder son Danny appears to be a harmless but purposeless drifter more interested in girls than his future, and their daughter Jane is self-contained and detatched; but their younger son Tim is dangerously intense and will grow up into an emotionally stunted and obsessional left-wing agitator.

They intersect with the Sellers – newcomers from London – in a variety of ways, but the central contrast is between the happy marriage of Alice and Bernie Sellers, along with their easy relationship with their daughter Sandra and son Frances, and the structural defects of their neighbours’ family dynamic. As it turns out, though, their love and openness can’t inoculate them from pain any more than the Glovers’ repression can.

Having introduced the children in 1974, the novel follows their progress into adulthood, their parents’ desires and worries falling into irrelevance through the inevitable attrition of time. This is where the slow burn of a narrative which has not been without its longueurs comes into its own – childhood traumas and triumphs are revealed as definitive (or formative) in unexpected ways. Beyond the magnifying glass of this minute examination, the twentieth century thrashes its way out of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Who will win and who will lose out of this national skin-shedding is a key question of the novel, but not necessarily the central one, despite what Hensher may have intended. Instead, his characters live and breathe most vividly where he
can observe them most intimately: at home.