On Purpose or At Random: The Engineering of Fiction in Tim Parks's "Goodness"

Independent Life
Technologies

In Tim Parks's novel Goodness, the narrator, George, designs an electronic game for his severely handicapped daughter Hilary, with pedals for her feet to press that turn on music and colored lights. Though she does activate the pedals and apparently enjoy the lights, he cannot tell if she is doing it "on purpose or at random." When given such a toy (nowadays commercially available, but not in the 1980s, when the novel takes place), children without developmental difficulties may begin with random button pushing, but they will quickly figure out which buttons produce which effects. It is not clear to George and his wife Shirley whether Hilary is engaging in this kind of trial and error, so purposefulness and randomness remain indistinguishable.

When George decides to try to burn down his house in such a way that Hilary cannot be rescued and will thus die in the fire without his being blamed for her death, he learns something about arson: "The most elementary secret to a successfully designed arson is that the fire must have only one focal point." The arsonist's goal is not to make intention and accident indistinguishable. He wants to disguise intention so that it looks like accident. Something done "on purpose" should look like it happened "at random." This is surely not the case with the serial arsonist who sets fires because he is mentally ill; usually, such an arsonist wants his intentions to be clear. But the one-time arsonist like George does not want to have his creation recognized as something created; it should look like it just happened.

Later, when George has set the fire after long and careful preparation, he finds himself upstairs in his burning house, where he contemplates the position he has put himself in: "This is the moment of truth I have so expensively engineered." The moment is "expensive" not because he has spent money on the act of arson but because of his "sacrifice" of his expensive house to his desire for a life without his handicapped child.

The "engineering" of a "moment of truth" is an excellent description of the writing of fiction. And the novelist's goal is the same as that of the arsonist who does not want to get caught: the "engineering" of that "moment of truth" in the story that leads up to it should not be detectable. For a work of fiction to be credible, it should look not purposeful but random, or its "moment of truth" will not be worth the "expensive engineering" of the writing process.

This is the implicit poetics of Goodness: fiction as an elaborate construction that tries to conceal its own constructedness. There are other types of novels, of course: the long-standing tradition of novels like Tristram Shandy that revel in their fictionality. But they share something with novels like Goodness: they, too, involve the elaborate engineering of "moments of truth," such as the epiphanies in James Joyce's novels. In fiction, a game that we play in order to have intense experiences, the writer may conceal it or flaunt it, or do a little bit of both, but no matter what, the fix is always on.

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My previous post on Goodness is "Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality." Anyone interested in even more posts about Goodness (and soon other novels by Parks) should check out the blog for my current seminar on Parks's novels, which I am giving at the University of Basel English Department this term.

The Point of Talking and Not Talking: Tim Parks, "Dreams of Rivers and Seas"

The following paragraph appears about three-quarters of the way through Tim Parks's novel Dreams of Rivers and Seas:

John felt clarity coming and going. It is pointless saying anything, a voice told him. The words were spoken quietly and convincingly, as if across a table in a quiet room where everything is calm and reasonable. It is pointless saying anything. John listened and saw at once how true that was. It was a wise voice. Talking is pointless. He hadn't really been listening to the girl, after all, had he? And she hasn't been listening to him. Why say anything? She just wants to take advantage of you. She's been telling you lies. Elaine had certainly lied. All the messages Elaine sends are lies. Text messages were invented for lying. John soon realised that. It's too easy. Then he was overwhelmed by an image of Sharmistha's body, her golden nakedness swam into his mind. She is right beside him. Her lips covered his. Her hair is on his face. And he started at the touch of Heinrich's hand. (322)

John James has been walking through Delhi at the beginning of a sandstorm. A young man who lives in London, he has come to Delhi without telling his mother, a doctor at a Delhi clinic for the poor, but at this moment, he has decided that he will go see her right away, despite the sandstorm, and he has left his cheap hotel to walk to her house. This is his second recent trip to Delhi; the first was a few months earlier, on the occasion of the funeral of his father, Albert James.

Three women are on his mind in this paragraph. First of all, he is accompanied here by Jasmeet Singh, a young Sikh in her late teens who was not only a pupil but also the mistress of his father's; she wants John to take her back to London with him. For a few minutes, they have been sitting in an unattended autorickshaw, waiting for its driver to turn up. After John hears this mysterious voice, he first applies its "wisdom" to his conversation with Jasmeet: here, "it is pointless saying anything" because neither participant in the conversation is really listening to the other. John wants Jasmeet to leave him alone, and, as John spins it here, Jasmeet "just wants to take advantage of" him. From this perspective, whatever she says has to be parsed as part of her attempted manipulation of him. But not all of what she says as the sandstorm rises is actually part of her attempt to talk him into taking her to London; in fact, as a Delhi native, she is trying to get the naive visitor to come in out of the dangerous storm. What she is saying is neither pointless nor manipulative; it is simply the attempt to communicate potentially life-saving information to John. John's observations about language are thus ironized by the situation; language -- and specifically conversation (in literary terms, dialogue) -- can be more than only "what the characters do to each other" (as Elizabeth Bowen put it in "Notes on Writing a Novel").

The second woman on John's mind is Elaine, his girlfriend back in London, who has been texting him incessantly in Delhi, despite his never responding to her messages. His train of thought runs smoothly from Jasmeet's "lies" to Elaine's, and then to a further interpretation of the voice's "wisdom": "Text messages were invented for lying." Unbeknownst to John (as well as to the reader, who will find this out in just a few pages), Elaine herself has just arrived in Delhi at his mother's house (as she thinks he is staying there). If John sees all of Elaine's messages as lies, his non-response to her messages has also been a kind of lie, as he had told her he was going to Delhi to see his mother, whom he has not contacted at all since his arrival in the city. Again, John's reflections on language's manipulative quality neglect its role as a provider of information, in which it is not "pointless to say anything."

Not saying anything also comes up in John's memory of a young Indian woman, Sharmistha, with whom he went to bed a couple nights earlier, only to break off his foreplay with her because her impotent boyfriend, an older German man named Heinrich, touched John's foot. Sharmistha had not said anything to John about the unusual nature of her relationship with Heinrich, who apparently always watches her when she has sex with other men. In this scene, she obviously assumed that John would not agree to let Heinrich watch; it was not her speech that manipulated John, but her silence.

John agrees with the voice that "talking is pointless," then, but the interactions alluded to in this paragraph (with Jasmeet, Elaine and Sharmistha) all undermine that conclusion. As a provider of information, language is more than manipulation -- and silence can be as manipulative as speech.

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That's a nice resonant conclusion, but there's one point in the paragraph that I want to pursue further for a moment: "Text messages were invented for lying." Ever since Destiny, Parks has explored the impact of mobile phones on fiction. In that novel, Chris Burton is unable to use his mobile because his charger in his lost luggage. In Rapids, the characters on a kayaking holiday in South Tirol constantly send texts back to friends and family in England. The "unreality" of the holiday, which I discussed in "The Delirium of the Real Thing," is highlighted by one teenage girl's sending of texts to her boyfriend back home within minutes after kissing one of the boys on the kayaking trip. In Cleaver, one reason the title character goes into the mountains in South Tirol is to get out of range of mobile-phone signals. And Parks's most recent novel, The Server (which I will be writing about soon), takes place in a meditation insitute where mobile-phone use is forbidden. Not only that, the participants in the meditiation retreats are not told that they will have no access to their mobiles during their ten-day vow of silence. Here, the silence of the organizers on this point is as much a tool of manipulation as the silence of John James in his silence at Elaine's numerous text messages to him.

In any case, there is a study to be written on the representation of mobile phones in Parks's fiction. It could begin with a consideration of how his works from before the mobile-phone era would look different if the plots were shifted to a few decades later. Cara Massimina, for example, is the tale of Morris Duckworth, a hapless expat English teacher in Verona whose kidnapping of, or elopement with, the Massimina of the title would not work at all in a mobile-phone era. Again and again in his work since Destiny, Parks has directly confronted the problems mobile phones raise for plot by making them central to his plots, just as they have become essential to the lives of so many of his readers.

"The Delirium of the Real Thing": Tim Parks, "Rapids"

Almost at the end of Tim Parks's novel Rapids, Vince, a character who has slowly emerged as the story's focus, decides not to return from his kayaking holiday in South Tirol to his job as a chief financial officer at a major bank in London. He reflects on the relationship between the holiday world and the everyday world: "Was it that all life until now had been a tired spell, from which he was suddenly released? Or was it this situation that was snatching him from reality?" (243). Here, the boundary between "all life until now" (his life back in London) and "this situation" (the kayaking experience in Italy) is identified as a boundary between the real and the unreal. This is made explicit by the second question, which identifies "reality" with the everyday existence his choice is "snatching him from." But retrospectively, it is implicit in the first question as well, in which the "tired spell" of routine is seen as something to be "released" from. From this perspective, one is enthralled by routine, in thrall to it, and the decision to not return from the holiday is a liberation into reality, an escape from the deadening enchantment of the everyday.

The idea that everyday life is not "real," while a kayaking holiday is "real," is articulated again and again in the course of the book. Early on, Clive, the head instructor on the holiday, says that "when you spend time by the river and on the river, you can't help but understand how dull and squalid a lot of so-called civilised life is" (15). When Vince's kayaking skills begin to improve, he senses it by noticing a change in how he thinks: "Never had his mind thought so intensely and lucidly" (132). And this intensity and lucidity is "the delirium of the real thing" (149).

But even here, the boundary between reality and unreality (holiday and everyday life) can flip, as in another of Vince's reflections a few pages later: "He was impatient for the parenthesis of this holiday to be over, so he could know how he really felt" (159). The intensity of the holiday experience now seems like unreality, like a parenthesis, and only back in London would he be able to identify his "real" feelings, not the heightened feelings of kayaking. Even Clive's distinction between "dull and squalid" life and the intensity of the river is inverted in his girlfriend Michaela's memory of an idea of his: "Well, Clive always says, the trouble is, after the high of getting away with it on the river, nothing has really changed. It isn't a real risk" (227). Michaela's conclusion is that "these sports are something you do instead of life" (240). The sporting experience, no matter how extreme it is, is not unambiguously "real." 

Vince summarizes this tension a few lines after the passage I began with: "Or each state was a form of enchantment, worth as much or as little as the other" (243). Here, both the everyday and the exceptional have their own "enchanting" character, and Vince reaches for an understanding of them that no longer privileges one over the other in a manner that cannot help be unstable. The intensity of the exceptional may seem more "real" than the everyday, but as long as the latter is also called "the real world," then the contrast will remain unstable. Whether "the real thing" is life at home or an adventure elsewhere, it will remain a "delirium."

(I also wrote about Rapids once before: here, in one of my earliest blog posts.)

Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality

The following is the first paragraph of the chapter "The Good Samaritan" in Tim Parks's novel Goodness. It appears about two-thirds of the way through the novel. George (the narrator) and his wife Shirley have a seriously handicapped daughter, Hilary, who cannot speak and has hardly developed beyond infancy:

January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: 'We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.' I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can't.

Like many a novel's narrator, George does not always have a very accurate vision of himself, but here he is right on target: he does swing between a "ruthless realism" that asserts his clear understanding of the world's difficulties and a "cloying sentimentality" that would conceal those difficulties in favor of an easier perspective.

The "change" he would like to "get out of" Hilary refers to childhood development: a puppy would develop faster than Hilary would. Since George had not wanted to have children, the reference to a puppy also recalls couples who stereotypically get a dog when they are "not ready for children." But what he and Shirley actually have to "get out of her" is her constipated shit, and it is in terms of shit that the contrast between realism and sentimentality is most fully realized here.

In a sense, "realism" appears here in the very fact that shit is mentioned at all, and it becomes "ruthless" in the explicitness with which George describes the "levering out" of the "turds." In contrast, George's "sentimentality" is somewhat concealed, only becoming clear in the final contrast between Shirley and himself: it is not both of them ("we") who do the dirty work but just Shirley. George wants to be a "ruthless realist," but when it comes to shit, he "simply can't" handle it.

The "realist," then, is beaten by the sentimentality his demonstrative "ruthlessness" is meant to combat. In his memoir Youth, J. M. Coetzee writes that "ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn." (See also this post.) Here, in Parks's novel, "ruthless realism" also ends up looking like a trick, and a relatively easy one at that: if you make a nasty joke and talk about your handicapped daughter's shit, then you are being "ruthless," even if it is your wife who actually cleans up the mess.

The "realistic" and the "sentimental" are also literary categories. Chronologically, the "sentimental" novel came first, in the eighteenth century, while literary "realism" emerged in the nineteenth century. In a simplified version of literary history, "realism" trumped the "sentimental" precisely by being "ruthless" rather than "cloying," and that is precisely the tendency of the "trick" of "ruthless honesty": it aims to produce a "realism" that trumps feelings.

But the slippery nature of this "hard trick" is clear in this passage. George plays tough, but is not really tough enough to face up to the challenge posed by his handicapped daughter. From the perspective of Parks's novel, the history of the genre is not the replacement of the sentimental by the realistic; rather, fiction "alternates" between the realistic and the sentimental. "Realism" would like to be "ruthless" enough to defeat "sentimentalism," but its tricks are never-ending attempts to conceal its own sentimental side. Let's talk tough about shit, but someone else has to actually dispose of it -- and the people who have to do so are those otherwise dismissed as "sentimental."

A Severed Head in Tim Parks's "Destiny"

In the following paragraph from Tim Parks's novel Destiny, the narrator, Chris Burton, is in the office of one Doctor Busi, the director of a clinic where Burton's schizophrenic son Marco had been confined until his recent suicide. At the beginning of the novel, Burton and his wife (an Italian) had been in London, where they heard the news of Marco's death. The novel presents Burton's train of thought as he and his wife head back from London to Italy (where he has lived most of his adult life while working as a journalist). The paragraph is typical in its abrupt, often unmarked shifts through various levels of narration and Burton's introspection. In particular, two issues are distracting Burton from his conversation with the doctor: first, he has just learned that he had been offered a pardon for tax evasion, but the deadline has already passed; secondly, the doctor's office in the villa the clinic is in has the remains of an old fresco on the wall. At the beginning of the paragraph, Busi mentions Burton's adopted daughter Paola, whose testimony about Marco's violent behavior towards her and their mother had led him to be confined to the clinic:

Your daughter was a frequent visitor, Busi acknowledged. He had been getting round to this, he said, but it seemed important to consider the nature of the deceased first, to clarify the question of suicide. Please do sit down, Signor Burton, Dottor Busi said. You are understandably fraught. Actually, I had imagined that at this point your daughter would have told you about all this. I wasn't aware you didn't know. But it's quite straightforward. Your daughter was a frequent visitor, Signor Burton. Marco was her brother after all. However, we, the staff here, in liaison, I might say, with Dottor Vanoli, since he has a longer experience of the case than any of us, agreed with her, your daughter, and her husband, that it would be best not to let you know of these visits, since it was felt your wife might intervene in some way. She might not approve. I sat down. Paola hadn't said a word. She was hiding things from me. I had been offered a pardon, I thought. A pardon! But the deadline has lapsed. We were concerned about your wife's reaction. I watched Busi speak. I face prosecution. The fresco must have been one of those jumbled crowd scenes where a saint is martyred. There was a head by the doctor's left shoulder. A woman's hand, a man's head. Will they pursue me if I return to England? Then on three occasions recently, Busi said, when we felt Marco was stable enough, we allowed him a day out with your daughter, if and only if accompanied by her husband, of course. I stared at the supine head. As I said, we agreed that these outings would be strictly confidential as it was clear that given the animosity between various members of the family this development might upset someone, Marco's mother in particular, and perhaps prompt her to intervene in some way, or even to return to Italy before the experiment of your absence had been properly explored. It was impossible to say whether it had been severed. Our assessment was that that experiment was yielding results. In particular, I should say -- perhaps it was just the broken surface of the fresco -- your daughter was concerned that your wife would feel that in taking Marco out she was deliberately exposing him to situations which would put her in a position to make false accusations that he had assaulted her. How real that convoluted worry was, I don't know, but under the circumstances and given what happened in the past I felt it wise to accept your daughter's request for confidentiality. (pp. 172-173)

"The broken surface of the fresco" includes a man's "supine head," but it is "impossible to say whether it had been severed." The fragment of the fresco that is left does imply something about the fresco as a whole ("must have been one of those jumbled crowd scenes where a saint is martyred"), but the part cannot be taken as standing for the whole. The "severed head" becomes a figure of the impossibilitiy of metonmyic reading, in which the interpretation of part of a work allows one to draw conclusions about the whole of a work. This paragraph, then, cannot stand for the whole of Destiny. The metonymic reading of details cannot provide a reading of the book as a whole. In its attempt to use individual details of the work to stand for the whole, close reading must fail.

This is reinforced by the paragraph's emphasis on the clinical interpretation of the schizophrenic. Just as Burton cannot draw conclusions about the fresco on the basis of the "severed head," Busi can only speculate about his patient, Burton's son Marco. The symptoms of schizophrenia represent tantalizing fragments that imply the whole "scene" without actually fully presenting that scene. 

Still, a metonymic reading of this paragraph as a depiction of the failure of metonymic reading falls prey to a simple paradox: how does this metonymic reading escape the critique of metonymic reading? But this paragraph is not a "severed head" that is all that is left of the novel. A metonymic reading depends on the "unread" parts still being present; they must still be there as potential confirmation of what one is claiming about the part one has focused on. My discussion of the paragraph began by contextualizing it; I filled in the absent details that make it possible to make sense of the paragraph. This metonymic close reading is not so critical of its own method after all.

The paragraph's overall structure confirms this. The juxtaposition of details from the dialogue with the details of Burton's thoughts also creates a metonmy that leads one to read from the part to the whole: the details interact suggestively as if they might belong together after all. The problem of Destiny is finally not that there are too few details in a "broken" fresco but that there are too many details. It is the surplus of detail, not the lack of detail, that prevents close reading of selected individual details. The diagnosis of schizophrenia through a reading of a set of fragmentary symptoms (of "severed heads," as it were) may be subject to the critique of interpretation figured in Burton's distracted comments on what is left of the fresco, but the novel as a whole is not.

A metonymic reading of a fragment, then, can only follow convention, what one expects to be the case ("must have been one of those jumbled crowd scenes"). But the problem of a metonymic reading of a complete work lies elsewhere, in the excess of detail that could be drawn into an interpretation, and in the necessary contextualization of those details in paraphrases like the one that began this discussion.

Ruefle, footnotes, Sebald

Thanks to Karin, who sent me the link in the comments to one of my posts on Coetzee's Youth, I read Mary Ruefle's short essay "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World."

Here's the bit about footnotes that I liked:

'For years I planned a theoretical course called "Footnotes." In it, the students would read a footnoted edition of a definitive text--I thought it might as well be The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge--and proceed diligently to read every book mentioned in the footnotes (or the books by those authors mentioned) and in turn all those mentioned in the footnotes of the footnoted books, and so on and so on, stopping only when one was led back, by a footnote, to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.'

Now that is a beautiful idea for a course!

And here's the bit about Sebald that I liked:

'I had recently one of the most astonishing experiences of my reading life. On page 248 in The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald is recounting his interviews with one Thomas Abrams, an English farmer who has been working on a model of the temple of Jerusalem--you know, gluing little bits of wood together--for twenty years, including the painstaking research required for historical accuracy. There are ducks on the farm and at one point Abrams says to Sebald, "I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colors of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind." It is an odd thing to say, but Sebald's book is a long walk of oddities. I did not remember this passage in particular until later the same day when I was reading the dictionary, where I came upon the meaning of the word speculum: 1) an instrument inserted into a body passage for inspection; 2) an ancient mirror; 3) a medieval compendium of all knowledge; 4) a drawing showing the relative position of all the planets; and 5) a patch of color on the secondary wings of most ducks and some other birds. Did Sebald know that a compendium of all knowledge and the ducks' plumage were one and the same? Did Abrams? Or was I the only one for whom the duck passage made perfect, original sense? I sat in my chair, shocked. I am not a scholar, but for the imaginative reader there can be discoveries, connections between books, that explode the day and one's heart and the long years that have led to the moment. I am a writer, and the next step is inevitable: I used what had been revealed to me in my own writing.'

This perfectly captures one element of the magic of Sebald's work: his particular gift for spinning out associations leads the reader to spin out associations as well. The most uncanny feature of the Sebald reader's free association on his works is how often the process leads back to his work again, as if he had anticipated the reader's personal response to the book. For a memorable example, see Tim Parks's essay "The Hunter," in his collection Hell and Back.

Good mail

A good day for my mailbox today: no bills or junk, Poetry, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. All that kept it from being a perfect day was the absence of an acceptance (or, in the absence of an acceptance, at least a copy of Light Quarterly to guarantee my reading pleasure until Harry comes out next week).

In Poetry (the July/August issue), Brad Leithauser, Wendy Cope, and Richard Wilbur are among the many writers whose work I look forward to reading. In the New York Review (the July 19 issue), Freeman Dyson, Ian Buruma, Garry Wills, Tim Parks, and Thomas Powers all have essays, AND there is an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee's forthcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year (which is listed as "to be published by Viking next January, but is being published by Harvill Secker in September). In the New Yorker (July 9 & 16), there's another Tim Parks essay, as well as an essay by Louis Menand.

Where to start?? I ended up starting with the New York Review, and the opening essay by Dyson. A great read over soup for lunch.

Thomas Hardy

Two interesting reviews of Claire Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy have appeared recently: by Adam Kirsch in the New Yorker and by Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books (not available on-line). Kirsch's appeared in the January 15 issue, and I noted the following to comment on at the time:

"His novels, and especially his poems, describe a world from which God has already absconded, and for good. Because this is still the world we inhabit today, he remains one of the most vital and relevant of English writers—more modern, in some ways, than the modernists who succeeded and disdained him."

This was not my experience reading Jude the Obscure a few years ago. I came to it after having read all the Harry Potter novels that were then available. One effect of this was that I wanted to read some nineteenth-century novels—for the plots and subplots and all the social details (the kind of narrative J. K. Rowling writes). First, I read A Tale of Two Cities, and then I read Jude. I loved both, but I was also struck by how much Hardy's novel seemed trapped in a particular time period: it could not have been written much earlier, and its concerns were no longer important within a few decades after its publication. Jude's exclusion from higher education on class grounds is, happily, no longer an issue in England or the United States, and the impossibility of divorcing Arabella is also a dated problem. I feel closer to Stephen Moss's comment: "Hardy's mindset and the moral vision of his characters are alien to us."

Kirsch's review also contains a lovely quotation from Hardy: "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."

Tim Parks on Thomas Bernhard

Tim Parks has written another fine essay in The New York Review of Books, this time on Thomas Bernhard: "The Genius of Bad News," in the January 11, 2007 issue. The article is not on-line.

Parks's wonderful summary of Bernhard's style could also apply to Parks's own work since Europa (1997), especially Destiny (1999): Parks describes "Bernhard's own tendency to introduce us in medias res to a mind in turmoil where events past and present, real or apocryphal, flash by in rapid succession without apparent order or hierarchy, where the voice speaking is so much aware of its own performance as to raise doubts about its candor."

I recommend both these writers highly, but with the caveat that, since Destiny (especially in Rapids, published in 2005), Parks has taken Bernhard's style further by incorporating the mental turmoil described above into narratives that have a clearer, crisper storyline than Bernhard's narratives usually do.

Discussion Group, Sept. 13: Tim Parks, "The Rapids"

Wednesday, September 13, 7 - 8:30 pm

Book Discussion Group on
The Rapids
by Tim Parks

The discussion will be led by Andrew Shields. Set in the dramatic landscape of the Italian Alps, this is the story of a group of English canoeists who arrive for an 'introduction to white water.' The dangerous river manages to bring out the group's qualities and failings in the most urgent fashion, provoking sudden conflicts and unexpected shifts of alliance.

Bergli Books
and Bergli Bookshop
Rümelinsplatz 19
CH-4001 Basel

The announcement says: "Anyone is welcome to attend the meetings of the Book Discussion Group but it is recommended that you have read the book in advance." Makes sense, doesn't it? :-)

See my earlier comments on "The Rapids."

Tim Parks, "The Rapids"

Another book I read on my trip (of many -- those were LONG airplane flights) was "The Rapids," by Tim Parks. It is a novel about kayaking on whitewater in northern Italy (in South Tirol, to be precise). A group of English kayakers is there for a long weekend of advanced kayaking lessons. As a theme, kayaking offers Parks the chance to say things about kayaking that also become metaphors:

There was always the tenth time when you didn't come up and didn't know why.

That particular sentence struck me because it captures one of the mysterious and fascinating things about sports: one does the same thing over and over again until it always works, and then suddenly it doesn't, and one has no clue why. Ski jumping is a sport that seems that way to an extreme degree: one jumper suddenly can fly ten meters further than before for a few months or a year, and then suddenly he can't anymore, and he can't explain why he got better or why he suddenly got worse again. Or a tennis player goes to hit an easy volley, and suddenly misses it, after having done it right dozens of times. No explanation possible.

In this novel, kayaking is about taking risks in order to push your envelope and have the exhilirating experience of success, but Clive, the main instructor in the book, sees what the limits of such risk-taking are:

... after the high of getting away with it on the river, nothing has really changed.

Parks himself takes risks in his narrative: such a story has an obvious ending that is hard to avoid: somebody has to die, or at least come close to dying, in a nasty accident. As is usually the case in his novels, Parks manages to get around this problem while also paying tribute to it, as it were. The way he does so is quite startling and powerful, so I won't reveal it here; suffice to say that he does sidestep the predictable ending in surprising and harrowing fashion.

Of course, after the high of getting away with it in the narrative, nothing has really changed. But that's all that art can do, it seems, or sport: provide a space in which one can get away with things, in which one can be out of character: "It was satisfying to do something out of character, something destructive." The destruction that one experiences in art, as in sport, is imaginary, and hence not really destructive. One goes beyond one's limits in a safe, controlled way.

Of course, sport is more dangerous than fiction (usually): you can die kayaking, which you usually can't do while reading a novel. Still, Michela (Clive's girlfriend) concludes that "these sports are something you do instead of life." Is fiction "something you do instead of life"? Perhaps, but I would always argue that fiction is part of life, and the "life" that Michela appeals to is also a fiction -- or a sport?