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A review by ffir
The Friendly Ones by Philip Hensher
3.0
The Friendly Ones follows two neighbouring families in Sheffield, the Spinsters and the Sharifullahs, skipping forward and backwards in time between the 1970s to the present day.
The Spinsters are a solidly middle-class white family. The elderly parents are Celia and Hilary. Celia is dying of bowel cancer and Hilary, at first deeply unlikeable, announces that he intends to divorce her and wishes to do so before she dies, although she has only months left to live, as it transpires to punish a decades-old transgression. Next door are the Sharifullahs, a Bangladeshi family who move to Sheffield permanently in the 1970s as their newly-formed country implodes and they struggle to come to terms with their own family tragedy.
The Spinsters are a family on the decline, with disintegrating relationships and children permanently divorcing themselves from the family. The Sharifullahs’s time in Britain by contrast charts an upwards trajectory, most evidently played out through space, as they progress through Sheffield real-estate. The final sections of the novel are perhaps a little heavy-handed in stressing this and it begins to feel a little like a children’s morality tale, where the spoilt Spinster children get their comeuppance and the hard-working Sharifullah’s become millionaires and a Baroness.
I’m still ambivalent about this book a week on from finishing it. I think there’s a question as to whether Hensher is the best person to tell the Sharifullah’s story, although this is mitigated by the fact that his husband Zaveed Mahmood is Bangladeshi-born and has inspired other works of Hensher’s and admittedly the most interesting section of the book are the passages set in Dacca . There are too many secondary characters, including Ada Browning the engineering department secretary; the real estate agent who has a page or so dedicated to her casual racism and the revisiting of Enrico to indicate Aisha’s success and there are some bizarre scenes which appear to add little to the plot, as when one of Aisha’s school friends converses with the spirits. With too wide a focus, a lot of the characters became bland and uninteresting and their motivations weren’t explained, leading to abrupt and illogical choices – Aisha’s love letter to Leo and then later Leo’s brief flirtation with the idea to run away with Aisha on meeting her for the first time in decades (despite his marriage and young child) spring to mind here.
There are some redeeming factors. I learnt about the formation of Bangladesh with the Friend of Bangladesh and the intense fighting between the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. There are compelling parts of the plot, including Hilary’s wish to divorce Celia, his gradual transformation into a more sympathetic character and the Sharifullah family rift which is slowly explained. A brief interaction between Aisha and an old school-friend (now an immigration lawyer) raises an interesting point about who is an immigrant and what defines that identity, comparing the highly-educated and well-off Aisha, whose father is an engineering professor at the University of Sheffield and whose mother owns multiple properties to her friend’s clients, who live in squalid conditions with 18 men in a house, who has to lock his food in a cupboard to stop the other men eating it and is fighting to remain in the country. Beginning and ending with family parties, the first for the Sharifullahs and the second for Hilary’s 100th birthday, brings a neat sense of resolution to the story whilst allowing some obvious comparisons between the two families.
Overall a mediocre read – not one I regret spending time on but not one that I want to revisit, falls short of expectations built by The Northern Clemency.
The Spinsters are a solidly middle-class white family. The elderly parents are Celia and Hilary. Celia is dying of bowel cancer and Hilary, at first deeply unlikeable, announces that he intends to divorce her and wishes to do so before she dies, although she has only months left to live, as it transpires to punish a decades-old transgression. Next door are the Sharifullahs, a Bangladeshi family who move to Sheffield permanently in the 1970s as their newly-formed country implodes and they struggle to come to terms with their own family tragedy.
The Spinsters are a family on the decline, with disintegrating relationships and children permanently divorcing themselves from the family. The Sharifullahs’s time in Britain by contrast charts an upwards trajectory, most evidently played out through space, as they progress through Sheffield real-estate. The final sections of the novel are perhaps a little heavy-handed in stressing this and it begins to feel a little like a children’s morality tale, where the spoilt Spinster children get their comeuppance and the hard-working Sharifullah’s become millionaires and a Baroness.
I’m still ambivalent about this book a week on from finishing it. I think there’s a question as to whether Hensher is the best person to tell the Sharifullah’s story, although this is mitigated by the fact that his husband Zaveed Mahmood is Bangladeshi-born and has inspired other works of Hensher’s and admittedly the most interesting section of the book are the passages set in Dacca . There are too many secondary characters, including Ada Browning the engineering department secretary; the real estate agent who has a page or so dedicated to her casual racism and the revisiting of Enrico to indicate Aisha’s success and there are some bizarre scenes which appear to add little to the plot, as when one of Aisha’s school friends converses with the spirits. With too wide a focus, a lot of the characters became bland and uninteresting and their motivations weren’t explained, leading to abrupt and illogical choices – Aisha’s love letter to Leo and then later Leo’s brief flirtation with the idea to run away with Aisha on meeting her for the first time in decades (despite his marriage and young child) spring to mind here.
There are some redeeming factors. I learnt about the formation of Bangladesh with the Friend of Bangladesh and the intense fighting between the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. There are compelling parts of the plot, including Hilary’s wish to divorce Celia, his gradual transformation into a more sympathetic character and the Sharifullah family rift which is slowly explained. A brief interaction between Aisha and an old school-friend (now an immigration lawyer) raises an interesting point about who is an immigrant and what defines that identity, comparing the highly-educated and well-off Aisha, whose father is an engineering professor at the University of Sheffield and whose mother owns multiple properties to her friend’s clients, who live in squalid conditions with 18 men in a house, who has to lock his food in a cupboard to stop the other men eating it and is fighting to remain in the country. Beginning and ending with family parties, the first for the Sharifullahs and the second for Hilary’s 100th birthday, brings a neat sense of resolution to the story whilst allowing some obvious comparisons between the two families.
Overall a mediocre read – not one I regret spending time on but not one that I want to revisit, falls short of expectations built by The Northern Clemency.