Famous foreign correspondent takes phone call in the foyer of London hotel. His schizophrenic son has committed suicide. His immediate thought: now my wife and I are going to split up, now there is no reason for us to stay together. Why? Why does he have that thought …
Destiny gathers the fruit, I hope, of all my experiments in the earlier books, particularly Europa, Shear and Family Planning. It's a story inside one man's mind, but a mind formed and conditioned by a complex dynamic of relationships: he's married an extravagant, aristocratic Italian wife, the livest of live wires, they have an adopted daughter, an unbalanced son, and his job keeps him constantly on the edge between two languages and above all between two mind-frames, two completely different ways of seeing the world. Was it one of these clashes, or their combination perhaps, that led to his son's illness? Is the brain's very chemistry vulnerable to the emotional chaos all around it?
Chris Burton and his wife set out from a strike-bound Heathrow for Turin where their son was living. What is he going to do with his thoughts on the long hours of that trip? Will he actually leave his wife? Her ex-lover's book is on display at the airport. Will he be able to make it to Rome and a precious interview with Giulio Andreotti? His ex-mistress lives in Rome. How will he respond to the sight of the body? Burton is writing a book on the predictability of national character but has absolutely no idea how he will behave himself. Weirdly, as we will discover, and with hindsight, of course, absolutely predictably.
The whole story takes place in just 72 hours. I was going for maximum intensity this time, looking at every turn for ways to have the emotional, the comic and the intellectual come together in mutually galvanising fashion, and this hopefully in line with some kind of psychological reality of a guy going over the edge. One's own occasional depressions and obsessions were useful. To get the effect I wanted I worked out a rather singular way of writing, which maybe I can illustrate with an image or two below. I would write by hand, as ever, rewrite every few pages on the screen, then start an immensely long process of writing into what I already had, cutting sentences in two and moving them about, intercutting maybe three or four thought patterns, all syntactically coherent, but only just hanging onto each other with all the interruptions. It was an exhausting business, but great fun to do and very exciting because I had the impression, perhaps illusory, that there was an authenticity to it, that it caught the sense one has of being trapped in one's head at moments of furious obsession: a sort of grim hilarity. Judge for yourselves. In the end, what I was after, I suppose, was a kind of text that would produce a radically different reading experience, simultaneously taxing and exhilarating. In the end one is always trying to write the book one would like to read oneself.

side by side

About half way down the page on the right picks up the original manuscript, but is much fuller now...

...and the reviews

Short takes

'This brilliant work fizzes with bleak humour and a crackpot energy…a powerfully affecting novel of married life and cultural incompatibility…Parks is an exceptionally acute observer of modern life'
The Daily Telegraph

'On any level, at every level, this novel is a dazzling and sustained tour-de-force…Easily the best of English fiction published so far this year, Destiny dissects the human comedy with equal measures of humanity and humour'
The Irish Times

'He can write, at will, like a modern Henry James, proceeding with composure through the labyrinth…Indeed, this is a novel that seems to exist on the brink, on the edge of insanity'
The Literary Review

Chronicle Of a death

Tim Parks's fine novel tells of a father's reactions to the news of his son's suicide. It's a bravura performance, says LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

Sunday Times, 12 September, 1999

Tim Parks's masterly new novel Destiny opens with a sentence with which Vladimir Nabokov would, I think, have been pleased. Containing no fewer than nine subordinate clauses, four of them folded parenthetically into others, it describes with aloof and scrupulous formality the circumstances in which the narrator received (and these words - abruptly plain - form the sentence's long-delayed thunderbolt of a climax) ''the phone call that informed me of my son's suicide".
The bravura of that beginning is sustained throughout. Destiny takes us inside the mind of Chris Burton, a British journalist who has lived in Rome for most of his adult life, and who has an Italian wife whom he immediately, by taking that call. resolves to leave. They are in London when they get the news. Over the next two days they travel, ever-hampered by air-traffic-contro1 strikes, atrocious weather and Chris's undignified disorders of the bowels and bladder, via Milan to Turin, where their son Marco died in a home for chronic schizophrenics, and via Novara to Rome. where he is to be buried, and where Chris happens, coincidentally, to be due to interview former prime minister Andreotti. At 10 points in this tragi-farcical progress we are made privy to everything that is passing through Burton's mind. Immediate experience, reminiscence and anticipation merge. Keeping vigil by his son's body, trying hard to keep his mind fixed on his loss, he cannot help recalling - in an abrupt, brief sentence - his mistress and the words with which, years ago, she dismissed him. Half-listening to a pair of strangers talking on a train, he is also wondering whether the pain in his gut is likely to kill him before the night is out, attempting to tease out the meaning of a note found among his dead son's papers, wondering what to ask Andreotti, quoting Leopardi to himself and - because the consciousness through which these thoughts are streaming is a very clever, verbally adroit one - toying with puns and correspondences that link the state of the Italian railway system with the care of schizophrenics, and tax-law with the theology of pardon.
All of these flickering thought-processes are simultaneous. Parks contains them brilliantly in a narrative that moves from one to the other as sure-footedly as a circus rider changing horses. This is not a book to open at random, or to read drowsily late at night. But it offers the attentive reader generous rewards.
Burton's grief is shattering. His all-too-human inability to rise to it, to become tragically ennobled, to forget the humbling demands of his body and of daily social intercourse (the kipper that keeps returning on him - the otiose politeness that prevents him cancelling appointments on the day of his son's funeral) is grimly funny. And for all its intricacies and detours, Parks keeps his story moving steadily with a concealed but rigorous coherence, towards its unexpectedly forgiving conclusion.
Chris is in the process of writing a "monumental" book (tombs and memorials are omnipresent in this novel) about national character and the way that, in his opinion, it renders all human behaviour predictable. He himself, though, seems to have no idea, from moment to moment, what he will do next and why. At the outset of the book this is an irony to which only author and reader are privy - a joke on Burton. But gradually, as he becomes increasingly and explicitly aware of the extent to which he is out of control of his emotions - and even, as he becomes more and more distraught, of his actions - the joke becomes broader, more farcical and more heartbreaking.
Parks, like his protagonist, lives in Italy. He has translated Roberto Calasso. He is a professed admirer of Thomas Bernhard. This fine novel, intellectually sophisticated, formally ambitious, belongs to a cosmopolitan European tradition. But it is one that pays honour to the heart as well as the mind. It begins with a sentence of elaborate convolution and proudly buttoned-up cleverness. It ends with a sequence of short, nakedly declaratory ones, including the tritest and, for a man of Burton's relentless self-consciousness and scepticism, the hardest to utter, "I love you."

DESTINY

By Michael Dirda Washington Post, Sunday, April 30, 2000

In one of the essays in his provocatively titled collection Adultery and Other Diversions, Tim Parks mentions in passing his enthusiasm for the books of the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. Never sufficiently known in this country, Bernhard composed bleak, misanthropic meditations on the human condition, Austrian war guilt, family unhappiness, and the inanities of the writing life; his best-known works include Extinction, Concrete and Correction. I don't think it too much to see in Parks's novel Destiny a kind of partial homage to Bernhard, not only in its style--pages without indentation, rapid temporal shifts, a complex stream of consciousness--but also in its pervasive misery and desperation, only partially alleviated by the narrator's occasional irruptions of sheer, unadulterated rage.
The novel opens with a sentence--a marvel of syntactic and rhetorical control--that slowly unpacks an enormous amount of information before the wallop of its final shocking word:
"Some three months after returning to England, and having at last completed--with the galling exception of the Andreotti interview--that collection of material that, once assembled in a book, must serve to transform a respectable career into a monument--something so comprehensive and final, this was my plan, as to be utterly irrefutable--I received, while standing as chance would have it at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge, a place emblematic, if you will, both of my success in one field and my failure in another, the phone-call that informed me of my son's suicide." Good readers will instinctively recognize in this highly contrived prose the heart of Parks's book. In essence, the novel is about control and self-control, about how we respond to tragedy and how it affects our judgment, stability and interaction with others, especially the members of our family. Throughout, Christopher Burton--an esteemed journalist, long resident in Italy, who now hopes to establish his reputation as a cultural historian--tries to deal with his son's death calmly, rationally. The young man, we eventually learn, has been institutionalized for schizophrenia; he has been violent toward his mother; in some ways, he was dead to his parents long before he actually took a screwdriver to his veins. Yet Burton's first reaction to the horrible news is unexpected: He realizes that his 30-year marriage is over, that there can be no reason for his wife and him to go on living together now that their son is dead.
In the 250 pages that follow, Parks recreates the next 48 hours or so of his troubled hero's interior life. The result is nothing less than a harrowing of the human soul. Relentlessly, obsessively, the anguished Burton analyzes his reactions to his son's death, gnawing away at every detail, harking back to the same unchangeable events of the past, repeating certain phrases, constantly grappling with his suppressed grief and with the dysfunctions of his marriage, family and career. More and more, he finds himself assailed by sorrowful memories, increasingly prey to anxieties and physical ailment. His wife, Mara, is Italian, a flirt, madly obsessed with her brilliant son, hostile to her plain adopted daughter, a woman who has repeatedly tantalized and tortured her husband, by a possible infidelity with a colleague, by her flashy, manipulative character and by her constant exclusion of Burton from her emotional life. Or so he presents her. He himself, we learn, has enjoyed a single joyous love affair but ultimately couldn't leave his family, feels closest to his daughter Paola, and is desperate to complete the great masterwork, about which he has obvious if tacit doubts. Following the news of his son's suicide, he goes for hour after painful hour without evacuation or urination. The more he asserts his clarity of mind, the more deluded he seems.
Destiny, then, is hardly what you'd call a fun read. But do we always read for fun? Here the sympathetic will find themselves gripped by the overwhelming testimony of a fictional yet altogether real consciousness. Burton's attempts at calmness, his increasing physical agonies, his utter confusion about what he should make of his wife, his son, his son's therapist, his own destiny--all these possess an almost scary feeling of truth to life. One can only hope that Tim Parks himself has not undergone such suffering.
In structure, the novel simply follows Burton and Mara as they laboriously make their way back to Italy: confusion over flights at the airport, travel by car and train, Burton's communion with his son's cold body, an evening with Paola and her young daughters, an hour or so at the cemetery, the necessary interview with Andreotti, and a final confrontation, late at night in a house full of ghosts, between man and wife. Imagine a secular version of the stations of the cross.
The intensity, the sureness of the emotional description, make all this pain worthwhile, even, in the end, cathartic. There are mysteries too--why did Marco kill himself after a seemingly happy day?--and unexpected revelations linking death, sex and family history. The prose itself is masterly. At times Parks writes sentences of apothegmatic sharpness: "Only the incomprehensible is worth understanding. . . . Journalism is the endless description of Hell. . . . Perhaps my happiest moments with my wife, I reflect, have been when she tells me where to drive and I have driven her there. . . It is disappointment gives us our identity. . . . We live between the inexplicable and the unpredictable." Throughout, Burton enunciates various harsh truths, seldom expressed: that he cannot forgive his beautiful wife for growing old; that he doesn't really understand national character (the ostensible subject of his magnum opus); that, as Schopenhauer also observed, "a good quality merges into a bad without any perceptible interruption to mark the passage from positive to negative: patience slithers into procrastination, impetuosity matures into decisiveness; tenderness tends to suffocation." For the literary-minded, there are neatly turned references to Leopardi's melancholy, the poet Foscolo's I Sepolcri (The Tombs), the pitiful story of the girl forced into a nunnery from Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi and even sly allusions to Browning and Shelley.
All in all, Destiny should confirm the view of many that Tim Parks is one of the best British novelists now at work (the poet Joseph Brodsky thought him the finest, period). Yet this particular novel--he's written nine others, including Home Truths, Family Planning and Tongues of Flame--may be too grueling, too excruciating an experience for any but the hardiest reader. Besides Bernhard, Destiny recalls the Beckett of Molloy and Malone Dies but without the funereal wit or linguistic playfulness. This is a dark night of the soul and no question about it. Parks may deliver a relatively hopeful ending, which the clever will guess, but the journey to those final pages is penitential.

A frenzied voyage through a private hell

Robert Farren, Sunday Independent, Dublin, 17 October 1999

Tim Parks's absence from this year's Booker Prize shortlist has already been questioned by at least one critic. Indeed, there cannot be many recent publications as enthralling or as structurally accomplished as Parks's new novel, Destiny.
Here we find ourselves trapped inside the head of an Englishman called Christ Burton. He presents himself as a highly respected ex-journalist in his mid-fifties, currently finishing a book which will be a "monument" to his distinguished career. He is locked in eternal psychological warfare with his Italian wife, who is hysterical, spiteful, false, flirtatious. Or so he says. Burton is an unreliable narrator par excellence (the author hates the term 'unreliable narrator'): paranoid, contradictory, hellishly egocentric. And he is our sole source of information.
The couple have a 25-year-old son, Marco, who suffers from schizophrenia and lives in a community near Turin. All his life, Marco has been implicated by his warring parents in an unbreakable and incestuous love triangle. (Parks has already described such a family structure in an essay-cum-short-story, also entitled "Destiny," which appeared in last year's Adultery and other Diversions. Allegedly it is a characteristic of the families of schizophrenic children.)
The novel begins in London, where the Burtons have just learned that Marco has committed suicide. On hearing the news, Burton's first thought is that there is "no reason at all for you and your wife to go on living together now." There is a touch of glee in the realisation.
The whole book spans less than three days, ending on the night following Marco's burial. During most of this time Burton is in planes, railway stations, hospitals, etc., on the hectic journey from London to Rome. This journey, which shapes the novel, is linear in its geographical aspect only; mentally or spiritually, Burton is going around in circles. He declares himself free from his long and appalling marriage as we follow him on a trip through the galleries of his psyche, progressing from hubris to brief self-knowledge, but then back to his old delusions.
Unsurprisingly, the last pages see him back beside his wife. But this time the once poised and self-satisfied intellectual, relishing the workings of his own intelligence, has suffered shocking mental and physical degradations and has revealed to us everything that he hides from himself. He is Virgil guiding an increasingly dizzy reader around the circles of his own inner hell.
Parks's great achievement in this novel is a stream-of-consciousness style that not only conveys Burton's thoughts, but above all mirrors stylistically the frenetic disorder of his mind. At every moment Burton is relentlessly zigzagging from one obsession to another, via associations of ideas that he refers to as "connections". He marvels at these phenomena until something unwelcome is thrown up. Then the offending thought is suppressed with the stern admonitions that "one must distinguish between the illuminating connection and the spurious." Of course, these unwelcome thoughts are often among the most illuminating for the reader.
In Adultery and Other Diversions Parks evoked the way that the ordinary thoughts and events of our daily lives weave in and out of each other in our minds to create rich tapestries of meaning. This was an important theme in almost every piece in that book. Now it is integral to the very structure of Destiny, but pushed this time to a claustrophobic degree of intensity.
Everything we learn about Chris Burton comes to us via an incessant bombardment of time-shifts, changes of place, of company, of mood.
This is a complex experimental novel reminiscent of various Latin Americans, even of Faulkner (Faulkner - now there's a compliment, I could kiss him for that!), but it is never obscure or difficult, as those writers often are.

purchases!

Okay, if you want to buy this book, those in Europe click here and those in the States here. You'll get taken directly to the appropriate Amazon page.