Seeing a changed land in the back of a mirror
Last May, I returned to Ireland where I had lived on and off for years in the distant past. Needless to say, the country was changed and, in places, destroyed, but, as I walked miles and miles over remembered routes, one detail began to preoccupy me. It was the disappearance of the raw wooden backs of mirrors (or looking glasses, if you prefer) in upstairs windows. However clunky they looked when viewed from outside, dressing-table mirrors set against the window for light were once a feature of even the finest houses.
People looked vague when I brought up the subject, but I’m quite sure that the setup was a casualty of the Irish having embraced American notions of the bathroom - for gone, too, were those dim, damp chambers whose Jansenist chill had discouraged all but the hastiest visits. In their place now were warm, well-lit spaces designed for mirror gazing, leisurely, unashamed disrobing, and material optimism. It struck me that the sweeping extinction of the mirror in the window was as emblematic of the vast changes in Ireland, of its way of life, its beliefs, and expectations, as the empty churches were.
Just such transformations in the quotidian over the years are at the heart of Philip Hensher’s extraordinary novel of memory and change, “The Northern Clemency” (Anchor, paperback, $16.95). (Indeed, a quarter of the way through, I bounced in my chair when a major character surveying his neighborhood in 1975 observes the dressing-table-in-the-window phenomenon.) Hensher’s attention to how people live, their houses, furniture, clothes, food, and the shops they frequent has significance that goes well beyond what we may call period detail. The changes are fundamental to the story he’s telling, which is about how the lives of the members of two families in Sheffield pan out from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. It is also about how that Yorkshire city, long synonymous with coal and the finest steel, was a casualty of both the megalomaniacal folly of Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, and the free-market rampages of Margaret Thatcher, the woman who declared, “There is no such thing as society.”
The period covered lends itself more than most to the scrutiny of the material conditions of life, for during it Britain was transformed: Industrial production died; utilities, transportation, and much public housing were privatized and rationalized (as they say) along market lines. Financial license, debt, and consumerism - the exchange of a “way of life” for a “lifestyle” - made nonsense of the traditional values of thrift, caution, and reserve.
One strand in the plot concerns the opening of a florist’s shop, the first in the area, which has taken over the premises of an ironmonger. It is a development that offends the Northern practicality of the older residents, but delights a character called Katherine. She is discontentedly married and bored - and, in an excellently sly joke if you are acquainted with Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis,” unable to remember whether she had sex after 1962. Nobody knows at this point that the shop is really a front for laundering drug money. Katherine sees it and its London proprietor as delightful additions to life, and not, as it is, the beginning of the end of Northern habits of life and a mere façade put on the emergent plague of drugs. “There’ll always be ironmongers,” she says blithely - though we know that there won’t.
Throughout the book relicts of other times surface, creating the sense that the past was innocent, at least, of its future and poignantly unaware that its own present could become so entirely gone. But at the same time, they also confirm the continuity in change: A solitary gorse bush is last testimony, but testimony nonetheless, to the moorland on which a housing estate has been built. Photograph albums with their record of outmoded hairstyles and clothes and once-close friends reveal the fabric of family history. Pieces of furniture, so exultantly up-to-date when first purchased, now discarded, still embody a family’s sense of an era.
This is a long novel with many fully realized characters; and it is their development which is the plot. There is also a great deal of quiet wit, many truly inspired similes, and some terribly funny set pieces - among them the staging of a recreation of the Battle of Nasby (1645). Above all, authorial kindliness pervades the work, making it the very model of a “good read,” the sort of book one wishes would never end.
There is not a hint of kindliness in A.N. Wilson’s “Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $30.), his third, and presumably last, chronicle of Britain that began with “The Victorians.” Fury and pained disgust could be said to be the book’s leitmotif for, in Wilson’s eyes, “the Britain which saw Elizabeth II’s Coronation and the Britain which will see her funeral are in reality two different, equally awful places.” This is a far sloppier book than its predecessors being a gallimaufry of gossipy fact, amusing caricatures, some sharp analysis, and great dollops of lambasting opinion.
The Gog and Magog at loose in these pages are irreligion and immigration; but they are joined by plenty of other connivers at and symptoms of Britain’s decline. Some are predictable, such as Tony Blair, who “wanted to appeal to the sort of men - publishers, architects, senior broadcasters - who drank fizzy mineral water, and who sat in expensive restaurants in their Paul Smith shirt sleeves.”
Others of the despised, such as Ted Hughes and Monty Python, are strange. Still, the most disconcerting aspect of the book is that it is simply spewed out, its arrangement, if that is the word, chiefly a matter of free association. It is Wilson’s way, for instance, to zoom over a few pages from the Bloomsbury group, to a jab at Islam and Christian evangelicalism, thence to Dr. Who and from him to the ex-wife of an actor who played him becoming the wife of Richard Dawkins, and from there to an excellent discussion of the latter’s rackety arguments for atheism. It’s all higgledy-piggledy and scamper or, as he says of the magazine Private Eye, “a peculiarly English combination of frivolity and anger.” Yes, except unlike that great contribution to letters, this is masquerading as a book.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
