my view of it...
Finchley, North London, 1968. A fifteen-year-old caught up in a flurry of charismatic religious fervour, complete with speaking in tongues, prophesies, "words of wisdom" and ultimately exorcism. This is the most autobiographical of my novels. With six typescripts already rejected, I relaxed I suppose, and in a state of savage hilarity wrote about adolescent times, never imagining the thing would actually get published. That was my first year in Italy, I must have been 25. The thing was written by hand in no more than four weeks in a gloomy, freezing cold room with Madonnas and sacred hearts on the wall and one huge painting of a woman holding a candle by a tomb. Far cry from my protestant background. But I remember this was the first time I had that sensation, no doubt illusory, of not being able to put a foot wrong. Though entirely unplanned, the thing came out without a single false start. Rejected by any number of publishers, it finally made it when an old friend sent a copy to the now defunct Sinclair Prize for unpublished manuscripts. Fay Weldon and Marina Warner picked it out. I take this belated occasion to thank them.
Short takes
'Merging structural simplicity with emotional complexity, Tim Parks has written a novel of extraordinary balance and grace'
'Not since Catcher in the Rye has there been such a believable portrayal of male puberty. The quality of story-telling and the cadences of the prose have a piercing authenticity.'
'Parks is a writer to watch. As a technician he cannot be faulted. His book builds to a terrifying tour de force, made bearable only by the tight prose'
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW January 4th, 1987
By Meg Wolitzer
Tim Parks opens his first novel in 1968, in the wealthy, suburban English vicarage where Richard's father presides over an ordinary, peaceful parish. Enter Donald Rolandson, a young curate who brings with him the "Sword of the Spirit," and with it a frenzy of religious fanaticism. Soon everyone in the parish has become obsessed, everyone, that is, except Richard. "Tongues of Flame" - initially rejected by six agents and 20 publishers, and last year's winner of England's Somerset Maugham Award for writer's under 35 - is a hilarious and original portrait of a young boy grappling with good and evil, two concepts that have been instilled in him by his fanatical but well-intentioned father. According to Richard's father, Satan is lurking everywhere, manifesting himself in "Chairman Mao, the Russians, the Vietnamese, the left-wing of the Labour Party, the unions, drugs, pornography, sex outside marriage, and certain types of modern music."
Mr. Parks (don't you love the Mr?) has a good eye for period detail, and he gives us a convincing illustration of British provincial life at a time when the world, according to Richard, was characterized by "an explosion of new hairstyles and new religions." Although larger, political turbulence is alluded to throughout, for Richard the most visible turbulence can be found in his own home, where the drama is of a religious and, as it turns out, a sexual nature.
Sexuality is embodied by Richard's older brother, Adrian, who openly sneers at the fanaticism that surrounds him and seeks fulfilment instead in smoking
pot and sleeping with his girlfriend. As the Bowen family becomes more and more obsessed with big ideas about Satan, Adrian's way of life is tolerated less and
less. Adrian is a complicated character; the author doesn't fall prey to making him a sensitive young rebel of the James Dean school, but instead fleshes Adrian
out, making him both nihilist and hedonist, and a force to reckon with. Adrian is extremely bright, with "a mind like a scalpel," according to Mr. Bowen, who goes on to tell his older son that he should treat Richard and his sister, Anna, kindly, for they "weren't that bright in the end," but that everybody is "equal under God."
Richard meekly absorbs his father's perception of him, and this helps set Adrian's specialness into relief. To Richard, and finally to everyone in the community,Adrian is extremely powerful. In an ordinary late-6O's household, Adrian would be viewed as just another sullen teen-ager with all the accouterments of the breed: long, unkempt hair, loud music and telltale smoke emanating from the bedroom. But in the Bowen household these elements are eventually decoded as "signs," proof that Satan himself lives upstairs.
The novel's climactic scenes take place during the church's annual Youth Fellowship house party, a religious retreat for teen-agers held at a ramshackle
boarding school. The special guest lecturer this year is Joy Kandinsky, an American evangelist in a pink pantsuit. She tells an impassioned story about a young homosexual man who was eventually "cuorange" through the Lord, and then she goes on to announce that there is someone in the room who is tortuorange by homosexual longing, and she urges him or her to come forward and be saved. Richard, who throughout the novel has remained curious but neutral about matters both religious and sexual, is forced at this point to examine his entire identity, as well as the identities of those around him. He realizes that he must start to form opinions and choose sides.
This realization is heightened by an outright witch hunt, of which Adrian is the quarry. A posse is formed to track down Adrian, who has been openly avoiding lectures and has been having sex with his girlfriend on the grounds of the boarding school. Richard watches in horror as his brother is apprehended, and a ritual exorcism ensues. This scene is perhaps the most powerful in the novel, and we hear a new voice emerging from Richard; one that is fierce and surprising.
What happens next feels extraneous, tacked on by the author for the sake of action, when the most interesting action is internal. As one brother is exorcised of "evil" the other brother, in a sense, is exorcised of passivity. "Tongues of Flame" approaches the notion of transformation on many levels - religious, sexual, emotional and intellectual. With all his inexperience
and timidity throughout much of the book, Richard is a perfect character to embody that idea.
Most of the characters in the novel are well drawn, and interact convincingly. The author seems to have had an especially good time inventing Richard's mild
and sad mother, whose job it is to sit at the rear of the church and make hand signals at her husband if he isn't speaking loudly enough during a sermon. Also believable is Richard's humorless sister, Anna, who likes to play her guitar and sing "I gotta Home in Gloryland that Outshines the Sun" on the chancel steps.
What emerges is a compelling family drama. Like many families. The Bowens live in close quarters yet are, in reality, worlds apart. The gradual shorangeding of a
child's conceptions of his parents and siblings is movingly exploorange here. What do you do, Tim Parks seems to ask, when you've been saddled with a crazy family?
There are no simple answers to this, and it is to the author's corangeit that he doesn't attempt to give us any. The character of Adrian has not been overglorified; in fact, Adrian is often downright nasty to his younger brother,
and difficult to love. Richard Bowen finds himself surrounded by friction, and it is this friction that finally ignites "Tongues of Flame."
Here's a little piece I toss in because it comes from, of all places, The Catholic Herald, perhaps eager to take a swipe at their Anglican brethren. Just for fun, I'll run it alongside a painting my brother did of my father's church in North Finchley. It was used for the Grove Press edition of the book
Into this conventional set-up comes the new curate, Donald Rolandson, Maggie, a sinister and devious lodger - and the `Holy Spirit. The combination of this trio is dynamite to the life of the rectory, and of the entire parish. The "renewal" has arrived with all its unruly accompaniments, speaking in tongues, healing, prophesying and moral crusading.
The Reverend Bowen aligns himself eagerly with the charismatics, ignoring the
dangerous and frenzied side-effects, as he works on a new book: "A Dove's Wings at the Gates of Hell".
The narrator, Richard is ever present, listening at doors and spying through peep-holes. He is whipped up alternately by spiritual fervour and adolescent sexual yearnings. Not since "The Catcher in The Rye" has there been such a believable portrayal of male puberty. The quality of the story-telling and the cadences of the prose have a piercing authenticity. Richard gropes for the truth, as so many Catholics did when confronted with the renewal movement - "I tried to speak in tongues," he tells us "because it seemed ... that if you didn't speak in tongues you weren't really a proper Christian and God hadn't blessed you.".
Barbara Hamilton-Smith
Okay, if you want to buy this book, click here. You'll get taken directly to the appropriate Amazon page (that's Amazon UK, book out of print in the US at present).
...and the reviews
John Walsh, Books and Bookmen
Catholic Herald
Jeanette Winterson, Times Literary Supplement
MANY novels about adolescence contain scenes in which the young protagonist is placed under extreme peer pressure, commonly involving drugs or cigarettes or premature sex acts. In "Tongues of Flame," the hero undergoes peer pressure of an unusual variety: to fit in, 15-year-old Richard Bowen must start speaking in tongues. All around him people are doing it; wherever he looks, it seems, someone is muttering nonsense words in a corner.
Soul-Searching Parties - an extract
Everybody was talking about Satan. Rolandson was talking about him almost
non-stop, and I remember he said at the Youth Fellowship on Saturday how
Satan was present in the words and music of certain progressive pop groups,
called Black Widow and Black Sabbath, who sang about witches' and black
masses: so all the members of the Youth Fellowship who had b0ught records by
these groups had to bring them into the meetings over the next weeks and have
them smashed to smithereens in front of everybody, and the debris was put in
the incinerator behind the vestries while we all sang "Raised on a Dove's Wing"
together, standing on the patch of gravel there in the howling wind.
The church started going out more into the community too,... sending out
nightly parties to knock at every front door in the neighbourhood and invite
people to our church. ... The groups that went out knocking on people's doors
were called "Soul-Searching Parties," because they were supposed to be
searching out souls for God. I went with them sometimes, but when I did I was
always afraid we would run into Adrian on the street, with his Afghan coat and
club foot and the cynical small grin.
Tongues of Flame by Tim Parks (Heinemann, £8.95 - those were the days!).
THE Reverend Bowen is a good man of the 1960s comfortably settled in his well-to-do suburban parish. His wife supports his work in the traditional vicar's wife's role, his pious daughter supports Billy Graham, his rebellious son supports the permissive society, and his younger son, the 15-year-old narrator, observes them all with an honest voyeurism as he vacillates between guilt-ridden piety and dangerous admiration for his cynical, but cheerful, brother.
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