Understanding Tim Parks (review)

In this useful contribution to USC's series of introductions to modern British writers, Gillian Fenwick seeks to persuade us that Tim Parks (1954-) is one of Britain's most notable novelists and 'men of letters' (translator, reviewer, writer of two [now three] widely read books on living in Italy) and of particular interest for being formally and thematically a 'European' writer (Ollier and Butor come to mind; Parks himself and several of his critics cite Beckett and Thomas Bernhard). Parks is not just an English artist-expatriate; he has become Italo-European while remaining English, sharing with several of his protagonists his own situation as the English head of an Italian family.

Fenwick perhaps overstates the variety as well as the comedy of his work. Reading Parks, we spend a lot of time stuck in or near the consciousness of loathsome, unreliable, middle-aged, ethically challenged expatriate Englishmen (see especially Europa and Destiny), not unlike some of Martin Amis's protagonists (here Fenwick oddly cites Amis père). She praises Parks's consciously exact, almost invisible style, even though it makes otherwise somewhat (Martin) Amis-like stories slow going without the (young) master's richly flamboyant and hilariously sub-Nabokovian way with words.

Mimi's Ghost (1995) has, however, Morris, an altogether livelier protagonist of the same type, who seems at first to be a Ripley-esque psychopath (NB: Parks's website suggests that Jude Law is in line to play Morris in the movie), or a Jamesian would-be exploiter-expatriate, but turns out to be more like Humbert Humbert, the rueful comedian as clumsily ineffective serial killer.

In one of Parks's best novels, Shear (1993), the rich and, to most readers, alien dialect of a working stone quarry achieves something of Amis's verbal intensity, if not his humour. Here the nouveau roman (e.g., Butor's and Ollier's metaphysical mysteries) provides one surprising context and Thomas Bernhard another: see Parks's web-page for the debate between Adam Mars-Jones and Parks on the latter's adaptation of Bernhard's stylistic traits and attitudes.

Shear shares with, for instance, Jim Crace's best work, Being Dead (1999), a remarkably effective mode of micro-realism, made up of tiny, supposedly exact, details of real-world process - the decay of human bodies in Crace (though Crace has declared that he made it all up) - and the difference between one slice of rock and another in Parks, where he accounts precisely for his own (accurate) knowledge of industrialized geology. Both writers have many admirers, and many excellent reviews, but fewer readers than they seem to merit, because(?) neither writer belongs to (largely London-based) in-groups or circles; neither has come closer than short-list (once each) to the Big Prizes; nor, being late starters, has either been a Granta Young Writer.

A study like Fenwick's, where the obligation to introduce and briskly survey the work of a putatively major figure (one who, it is postulated, needs some intermediary critical assistance to be 'understood' and/or appreciated), must 'place' him cannily among his affinities, both ancient and contemporary. That Parks's contemporaries (born around 1950) constitute one of the richest of recent generations of English fiction-writers must be taken into account when making claims for an author less widely known (I agree) than he should be.

Fenwick scrupulously, if somewhat repetitively, provides so many quotes or paraphrases not only of other critics but also of Parks's views on his own writing that she praises him, it seems, for exactly what he wishes to be praised for. Perhaps she could occasionally go against the grain of Parks's self-understanding to make her own voice more audible.

Too recent for Fenwick to consider here is Parks's novel Judge Savage (2003): the interior monologue of a Black Englishman, who, being a judge, has planted at least one foot in the Establishment...