NEWSMAKERS
Lived experiences
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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With The Northern Clemency featuring in the Man Booker shortlist, Phillip Hensher talks about his writing, and his feelings on making the shortlist.
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’I long ago learnt never to think about prizes in advance. I forgot about it, and it has come as a wonderful surprise.’
Photo: AP
For Phillip Hensher, featuring in the Man Booker 2008 probables is “a wonderful surprise”.
For the first time, this columnist for The Independent has found his name in the coveted list of six shortlisted candidates for his novel The Northern Clemency. Though Hensher served as a Booker judge seven years ago, he made his mark as a contestant only as far as the Long List, with The Mulberry Empire in 2002.
With rave reviews supporting The Northern Clemency, Hensher is a man of hope these days, though his humility comes in the way of expressing it.
English social life
“No one can ever expect that degree of good fortune — it wouldn’t be right. I long ago learnt never to think about prizes in advance,” he says in an e-mail interview. Hensher quotes a Syrian expression, “to ‘put the melon in your stomach’, which means to swallow anything which threatens to overwhelm your thoughts and forget about it.” He adds, “I forgot about it, and it has come as a wonderful surprise.”
Set in Sheffield, England, The Northern Clemency, a Fourth Estate publication, focuses on the relationship between two families — the Glovers and the Sellers. Through their everyday experiences, he paints a picture of English social life in the Thatcher era. Hensher restrains himself from allowing the political England to enter into the social milieu too much though. “It’s an attempt to show that large historical movements only touch on the edges of ordinary people’s lives, which are nevertheless changed by them.”
He also doesn’t want to be judgemental about the phenomenon. “I don’t think that ordinary people can be criticised for not devoting their thoughts constantly to historical change or political turmoil. Except in very extraordinary circumstances, social and political turmoil changes people incrementally, and it was that incremental process I attempted to explore in the book.”
In the narrative, every so often, a major historical figure does enter a character’s thoughts, conversation or direct experience.
“My concern in the novel was always to be absolutely truthful about lived experience, not to shoe-horn direct discussions about ‘What Is Changing About British Society’ into the action,” he states. As a Briton, the author says he has sprinkled “bit of autobiographical elements” in the pages too.
Parsimonious style
Hensher’s narrative style is also quite parsimonious with the physical description of his characters, be it Katherine Glover, her husband Malcolm or even little Tim — whose head, the reader is suddenly told on page 269, looks like “a bowling ball sitting on his shoulders”.
Hensher responds, “Novelists differ greatly in their physical descriptions of characters. Jane Austen, for instance, hardly ever says anything other than describing a character as beautiful, tall, dark, or of a good figure, leaving everything to the reader to work out. On the other hand, Judith Krantz, in I’ll Take Manhattan and Princess Daisy introduces every character with two or three paragraphs of their physical description, their brooding brow, their manly forelock, etc.”
He continues, “In a novel with a large cast of characters, it makes the texture very monotonous to do anything but suggest. They are much more real through their characteristic turns of phrase and characteristically expressed thoughts than one having blue eyes and another brown.”
Hensher, Chief Reviewer for The Spectator, feels a compelling page-turner is one where both the reader and the author know the characters to the point where they can actually surprise both of them, “so that a reader can continue an imaginary conversation with a character after the book has finished”.
Hensher’s earlier book, Kitchen Venom, a Somerset Maugham Award winner, sparked a controversy. He was removed from his job in the House of Commons for giving an interview to a gay magazine. That was in 1996. Today, he says, “Times have certainly changed for me since 1996.” Though he thinks, “I’d still be sacked from that job for the same offence. It was an awful job, I was absolutely terrible at it, and it all worked out for the best in the end.”
A compelling writer, Hensher feels his next book may be of particular interest to Indian readers. “I am planning a novel set in the Punjab hills in the 18th Century,” he says. And as far as the other shortlisted works are concerned, he says he will “read them only after the whole circus is over.”
Photo: AP
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