A husband and wife, long since aware of the shaky state of their marriage, had shared the habit of a weekly roundtrip of 800 miles to visit their mentally-ill adult son. This ritual ended with their settling temporarily in London while the husband, former journalist Christopher Burton, works on his "monumental" book, a study of national characteristics.
However, the dynamic of enforced togetherness seems set to finally collapse when Burton receives a phone call from Italy informing him that his son has killed himself. The long opening sentence of English writer Tim Parks's 10th novel is a suitably lucid, if chaotic, prologue for what is to follow. By the third sentence, Burton - a narrator of disarming directness - has announced: "I realised, with the most disturbing clarity, that this was the end for my wife and myself. The end of our life together, I mean."
Burton, whose journalism established him as an authority on Italian affairs, has rejected his career in order to write a book that will assure his reputation - at least, that's the way he sees it. Now in his mid-50s, he has survived a heart bypass, is at the mercy of his intestines and is caught up in the increasingly hate side of his love-hate relationship with Mara, his unpredictable Italian wife. Their life together has always revolved around their differences. He is English, though, having spent most of his adult life in Italy, appears to have become caught between cultures ("In Italy they take me for a German. In England for an American"); his wife is a Roman hailing from impoverished aristocratic stock and with a flair for operatic gestures. High drama is her natural environment. Her extraordinary abilities enable her to defy authority and invariably get her own way, while he looks on in bemused embarrassment. Naturally, she is the sort of person who can cajole her way into an airport departure lounge without a boarding card - and does. Even now that their son is dead, she decides to alter the facts, saying he is seriously ill, which is quickly updated to dying, all to further her cause in securing seats on the earliest plane bound for Italy. Meanwhile the narrator braces himself for her next trick, which could be anything - such as "the drama of resurrecting our son. Is that what comes next? Our bringing him back from the dead."
On any level, at every level, this novel is a dazzling and sustained tour de force. The cleverly intercut and apparently continuous stream-of-consciousness narrative consists of Burton's preoccupied monologue, which outlines the events as they unfold from the moment he is called to the phone in the hotel lobby. The news brings the couple home, and the trip in the face of an airline strike (including the confusion in the airport) makes for a hilarious episode: Burton plays the embarrassed straight man as his determined wife goes into melodramatic overdrive, passively watching and noting the deviousness of her performance. But along with his reporting of the present are softer, more reflective flashback-like meditations on a strange, exhausting marriage in which she has consistently fought against all odds, including nature's, by miraculously giving birth some years after adopting a Russian orphan. Of course even the adoption was another feat. And let's not forget her affair with one of his colleagues, which was conducted throughout in French. It is a marriage which succeeds and fails because of a relentless clash of culture and temperaments as well as a succession of harsh tests. All of this is convincingly handled, but the real genius of this extraordinary novel lies in the way it develops on several levels. Parks takes one man's consciousness and explores the way a mind clambers along, grappling with a variety of perceptions, memories, bits of information, and physical sensation - and all at once. Burton is aware that although he has just heard of his son's gruesome suicide, the news does not stop him buying a copy of his rival's new book while he continues to ponder his wife's affair with the author.
There is also the matter of Burton's severe constipation, sending him frequently and in vain to the nearest men's room. In addition to all this is the pressing matter of attempting to set up an interview with a former Italian - and now disgraced - prime minister. There are also detailed conversations with an overly charming Italian psychiatrist. Every digression works, the dialogue is deft, the irony exact ("we are not a typical Italian family"). There is a faultless sense of pace matching the speed of the narrator's mood-shifts and relentless change of subject. If ever a man were watching a fast moving film of his own life, it is Christopher Burton.
Random memory, coupled with the exact perceptions of the moment, unite in creating a palpable sense of Burton's life with a mate who continues to both fascinate and terrify him. Conceding that Mara has given him his career and that through her he has infiltrated Italian life, he also, however, resents this dependency. Burton emerges as a very real creation, tormented by regret, and both detached and hopelessly engaged. Destiny testifies - as did Parks's previous novel, Europa, deservedly shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize - that this writer is expert at the frantic yet chillingly well-observed interior monologue. He has concentrated on emotional and sexual relations, often tinged with brutally subtle violence. Just as Europa was sustained by the churlish narrator's resenting his former lover's ability to survive their affair, this new book triumphs through Burton's helpless awareness of his passive role in a marriage shaped by his wife's crazy behaviour.
The narrative is utterly convincing, both moving and hysterically, achingly funny. Burton is no saint and has had many affairs; he is also intelligent, as unheroic as selfish, though no more or less so than the rest of us. But the ultimate achievement here is the magnificent characterisation of Mara. There are so many inspired set-pieces that the narrative - for all its deliberate chaos - is coherent and convincingly seamless.
Early on, Burton reflects "our lives run parallel to our dreams", and Parks, while allowing his narrator moments of near-lyric clarity, never loses sight of him as a cynical, disappointed member of the human race. "No, it is appalling", observes Burton, "I suddenly thought, my eye ranging over the huge throng of people in the airport concourse, to have to recognise that everybody at all times is obliged to have at least some trash or other going through his head." Since the publication of his first novel, Tongue of Flame, in 1985, Parks - who has lived in Italy for almost 20 years - has constantly explored the narrative voice. Easily the best of the English fiction published so far this year, Destiny dissects the human comedy with equal measures of humanity and humour.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and an Irish Times journalist
