LONDON — Philip Hensher experienced an unusual contraindication to completing "The Northern Clemency," his epic Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel about Britain in the 1970s.
"I started looking at orange plastic plates in junk shops," he says, "and thinking, 'Ah, this is quite nice.' "
Sitting at a cafe on Sloan Square, Hensher, a big cheery man in a pink shirt, chuckles and takes an anthropological tack on this recent fetish.
"I think domestic interiors are very interesting; they are always a mixture of the sincere and the aspirational. They state how people really are, and then other objects seem to reflect how they would like to be."
"The Northern Clemency" takes these details -- the stuff of domestic life in the hopefully landscaped, burgeoning suburban development of Sheffield -- and uses them to spin a mammoth, emotionally affecting tale of two families.
The book begins with a garden party hosted by the Glovers, a fractured family on the cusp. As the novel unfolds, and the Glovers gradually unravel, a second family, the Sellers, moves to the neighborhood from London.
Slowly, hilariously, the book chronicles the fortunes of each family as they rise and fall over the next two decades. It is, in many ways, to England what Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" was to America; Amazon.com recently selected it the No. 1 book of the year.
Hensher, 43, grew up in Sheffield. His father was a bank manager, his mother a college librarian. He originally planned to excavate this past in a brief book.
"When I started, I was going to write a very small, quiet novel about childhood, and it was going to be 150 pages long, maximum," he says.
But then he wondered what would happen to a young, obsessive child like so many he knew. "Well, I thought, of course he would be a member of one of those mad, leftist groups," he says.
Sheffield may have been boring, but it was impossible to grow up there in Hensher's time and not be affected by the violent miners strike of 1984.
"We talked about it for weeks and weeks," Hensher recalls. "There was a great deal of door slamming and people not speaking to one another."
The politics of the period had been trickling down to children for a decade at that point. Hensher attended a local comprehensive school that had aspirations to becoming a grammar school.
