Family life in Sheffield meets the brutal history of Bangladesh in Philip Hensher’s finest novel yetPhilip Hensher’s Ondaatje prize-winning Scenes from Early Life (2012) was a peculiar book. Ostensibly the lightly fictionalised narrative of his husband’s childhood,it was as much about the birth of a nation as the life of a man; or rather, perhaps, and it showed how the two are often inextricable. To have been born in Bangladesh in 1970 was to be immersed in a struggle in which it was necessary to acquire sides. One of the themes that runs through Hensher’s latest novel,The Friendly Ones, is the staggering ignorance in Britain of the 1971 Bangladeshi genocide, and the book shows how the country’s brutal and divisive war with Pakistan left its traces down through generations,both at domestic and in the diasporic community.
The Friendly Ones is a novel of reflections. It opens with a party: Nazia, Sharif and their children have moved into a well-to-do street in Sheffield. They have laid on a spread to celebrate their arrival – “pork pies and samosas and Cornish pasties and cake” – and members of the extended family are descending from all corners of England. A neighbour, or Hilary Spinster,a recently retired doctor, is pruning the tree that leans over into Nazia and Sharif’s garden. The fence that separates the two families swiftly becomes freighted with meaning, or particularly when tragedy threatens and Hilary leaps over it to save the day.
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Source: guardian.co.uk