A story of friendship through the years, to be enjoyed slowly and with great care
With its large cast of characters and charting of intergenerational trials and tribulations, the revelation of tragedies hidden in a family’s past and estrangements between kin, Philip Hensher’s majestic tenth novel, The Friendly One, is reminiscent of an engrossing yet challenging Victorian classic.
It’s the story of two families, neighbours on a leafy, up-market, middle-class street in early 1990s Sheffield. On one side of the garden fence is the soon-tobe-widowed Hilary Spinster, a retired GP whose four children have already left home; while on the other is Sharif — a professor of engineering at the university — his wife, Nazia, their twin boys, and, on this particular sunny day, their older daughter, Aisha.
A freak accident brings an abrupt end to the day, but Hilary’s quick-thinking, as he vaults the garden fence to offer his assistance, cements a friendship between the two families that will last for the next three decades.
The Friendly Ones is not a novel to be rattled quickly through. It’s a story that demands a degree of care and attention from the reader — not least so as to be rewarded for one’s effort with the full appreciation of the minutiae that make this novel more than the sum of its parts.
Initially, Hensher turns his attention to the Spinsters, a family riven with dissatisfaction and disappointments.
So, too, Nazia and Sharif’s clan are carrying their own trauma, Hensher later transporting us back to Bangladesh in 1971, a country fractured by the war of independence — the ‘friendly ones’ of the title a reference both to the cordial relations formed over a Sheffield garden fence and the name of the network of collaborators working with the Pakistani authorities during the war.
Notably, the Bangladesh-set scenes are no less fully realised than those in Britain.
This is due, in part, no doubt, to the fact that it’s a landscape Hensher’s already familiar with, having set his prize-winning 2012 novel Scenes From Early Life in 1970s Dhaka.
But it’s also evidence of the impressive evenhandedness he takes when it comes to the two strands of his story — no mean feat in a novel of this length and weight.