The novels of David Park are unabashedly polemical, fiercely honest tales of human weakness, but the unassuming author likes to stay in the background and let his stories speak.
THERE ARE NO easy answers; few will admit that, least of all politicians. But novelist David Park calmly sits and smiles a resigned half-smile. He doesn't believe in easy answers - he has too much regard for the truth. Even now, on the 10th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, he would prefer to wait and see, the rhetoric washes over him. Nor does he favour small talk. He watches and listens, and most of all, he considers. These are the qualities that have made him a writer. His latest novel, The Truth Commissioner, serialised on Radio 4, is a fine, crafted novel, but it is also an important book.
In it, Park carefully explores and exposes any notion that the past is something that people simply forget. "I wanted the story to develop by looking at the lives of a group of people who are connected by one incident." None of them are heroes, none of them are perfect, but they are all human - even Henry Stanfield, the dislikeable truth commissioner himself. "I don't like him, he is self-serving and only using the appointment as a way of reviving his own career, a horrible character," decides Park.
Although he seems not overly pleased that the novel has been seen as a polemic, it is that. This is a book that had to be written, and written by him. David Park has consistently looked at his world in fiction that is concerned with life as lived in the society in which he has always lived. He is always true to his sense of place - and that place is what? Ulster, the North, Northern Ireland? What does he refer to his place as? "I don't see it that way; I don't think of it as 'The North' - it's where I'm from."
He says he is surprised to hear The Truth Commissioner being described as a polemic, but polemic it is. "You say it is tough, harsh. Well, I'd consider the one that went before it, Swallowing the Sun, as tougher, more harsh."
There is nothing defensive about his comment, Park is interested in talking about books, it doesn't matter to him all that much who wrote them. While discussing one aspect of The Truth Commissioner, he cuts across and mentions a recent book by another writer: "Have you read it? What did you make of it?"
He seems to have come a long way since the publication, in 1990, of his first book, Oranges from Spain, a collection of short fiction; 14 stories written in the great tradition of Michael MacLaverty. MacLaverty's voice has been important; so too, in many ways, is that of Bernard MacLaverty as well as that of Brian Moore.
At that time, the author's note on the Jonathan Cape hardback edition seemed to say very little - and yet quite a lot. "David Park is a teacher in a country school in Co Down. He is 36 years old, was born in Belfast and lived there till five years ago. He is now working on his first novel."
It is as if Park wrote the note himself. It is concise and to the point, no padding, like his fiction. That first novel became The Healing (1992) in which a UDR man is shot dead as his 12-year-old son watches. How does he feel about that novel now? "I think it's naive and preachy, I don't like it much," he says, bluntly, matter-of-factly in a neutral voice. He is very critical of his work, dissecting it with the detachment of a golfer or a snooker player explaining what went wrong with a particular shot.
But if Park is critical, even dismissive of his work, it is because he is quietly aspiring for perfection; he is waiting for the great book. He has already written good, even outstanding ones such as The Rye Man (1994); with its intense, layered narrative, it is one of the most seriously under-celebrated Irish novels.
A likeable, direct character, it is easy to imagine Park dealing kindly with either an anxious parent or a wayward child. Some of his best writing to date is in his new book, yet anyone who has read his previous work will immediately say: "How about The Rye Man?" or "Look at the 'Against the Cold' sequence in The Big Snow (2002)." As long ago as 1993 writer Dermot Bolger was aware of the presence of David Park and included the title story from Oranges from Spain in The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction.
THERE IS A controlled rage about Park - it comes from his sense of justice; he has watched history unfolding all his life and is well aware that in his world, a world of two camps, two traditions, people always see the differences, and tend not to forget. The middle one of three sons born to a working- class Protestant couple, he says, "My father was factory worker; my mother cleaned the local school. I went to Queen's and studied English." He has now been teaching for 31 years.
"I'm a teacher who writes. It is hard to find the time. I'm the head of a department; there is a lot of administration work, as well as preparing classes. When I come home, I can just about flop down in front of the television. It's all I'm able for."
He is not complaining, just describing what it is like - teaching, if done correctly, honourably, is an exhausting business. In the age of the writer as celebrity, or writer as grant-aided artist to nurture, Park, who has published six novels since that first short story collection, remains something of a publishing oddity - a respected writer who manages to stay in the background without attempting to make a mystery of himself.
It is not that he is reclusive, he is simply low-key. He is well reviewed, his books are praised, his prose style is described as lyrical and is often mentioned by other authors, who, when being interviewed themselves, will suddenly pause and ask, "Have you ever read David Park's books? What's he like?" Park would find such curiosity highly amusing.
A compact, unobtrusive father of two, just turned 55, he could be a spy, or a policeman, or a doctor, about to give you bad news. He may not waste words, but he is quick with the dry one-liners - he takes a call in which the couple of exchanges could pass for dialogue from a Pinter play. "It gets like that when your son's 17."
Park misses very little - he wouldn't write as sensitively if he did. Being interviewed is for him a bit like filling in a form, only marginally better than being photographed. You can almost see his mind racing along, imagining how he would write it himself. His books are serious but there is humour; he understands the inner lives of characters, he sees the weaknesses and the vulnerabilities. In person he looks disarmingly like a slightly younger version of poet Derek Mahon, whom he admires. "I can remember when I first read him, thinking 'this is great, great poetry', he is wonderful." (I don't tell him that he that he looks like Mahon.)
"I write in bursts, sometimes, I write maybe 1,000 words. Or weeks could go by before I get back to it. Often I've forgotten the names of the characters, I'll get them wrong." This explains the methodology of novels such as The Big Snow, which, although linked by a theme, the heavy snow shrouding Belfast in 1963, is really a series of independent stories. The Truth Commissioner is also written in a long, self-contained sequence, but the characters and the action are interconnected by one horrible killing, the murder of a young boy, a petty criminal, whose family is intent on discovering the real cause of his death. Park sets out to show that his character cannot escape from the truth.
HE RECALLS HIS editor arriving from London for the day to go over his book with him, pointing out how a character's name had changed over the course of the narrative. Park smiles at the thought. As we sit in a restaurant where the ordering is slow but the plates are speedily removed while we are still eating, he describes the adventure of moving to the country and living in a half-built house with his wife before their two children, James and Sophie, were born. Some of that battle with building a house was put to effective use in The Rye Man in which an ongoing sewerage problem adds to the tension existing between a couple who have lost a child; the central character, a teacher, and his depressed wife attempt to re-start their lives.
"I still like that book, it's something I'm pleased to have done. That story of the child is something I've never forgotten." In the novel, the central character, John Cameron, has, as a child, discovered a boy who had been kept in a cage. Although he has been living in the countryside for more than 20 years, he still regards himself as a city boy.
"I don't know the names of the trees or the birds." It is a feeling he made brilliant use of in the powerful opening sequence of The Truth Commissioner. A young boy has been captured and is taken to a house in the countryside. He manages to escape into a terrifying place, the dark beyond the hide-out. "The world is strange, stranger than he's ever known, and it takes his breath away. He hears his own whimper as he looks up at the white fullness of the moon and the air is scented with smells he doesn't recognise . . . his hand grips the bark of the tree that's unlike anything he has ever touched before. It's uneven and furred and gnarled and feels so alive in his hand that he wants the dead touch of brick, of concrete, of the street where he belongs . . ." The passage is typical of the intensity of Park's writing.
He sets out to examine what it means to be alive - and does so in fictions that are subtle, understated, not without a hint of menace and always courageous.
