Who will judge the judge?

Tim Parks lets the thoughts and voices of his characters intermingle in his state-of-the-nation novel, Judge Savage

Robert Macfarlane

Sunday March 2, 2003

The Observer

Judge Daniel Savage has followed the pro-forma career of the upper-middle-class Englishman: off first to Rugby school, from there to a humanities degree at Oxford, and then into an auspicious career in the law. Except that Daniel isn't a pro-forma upper-middle-class Englishman. Adopted from Africa as a baby, he is in fact 'of obscurely mixed origin'. Or, as his colleague and oldest friend, Martin, puts it, he has 'boot polish on his face'.
At the opening of the novel, what Martin disparagingly calls 'chromosomatism' has worked to Daniel's professional advantage, and he has been promoted to judge on a northern circuit. Things are looking good domestically, too. He and his musician wife, Hilary, have bought a new house and a Steinway grand. Daniel is looking forward to coasting through the last 10 years of his career, and into a 'jolly' and genteel retirement. He 'just can't get over how comfortable life is'.
In fiction, complacency conventionally precedes catastrophe. Sure enough, the bulk of this bulky novel is taken up with describing Daniel's fall from grace. Sexual misdemeanours buried in his past begin to detonate in the present. His marriage fractures. He delivers summings-up in court on the nature and necessity of the modern family, even as his own perfectly nuclear family goes into meltdown. After adjudicating over a controversial race case, he is beaten into a coma by unseen attackers. Daniel's sense of identity 'fizzes away like aspirin in soda water', as Parks brilliantly puts it, even as his public duty requires him to remain utterly coherent and decisive.
Parks never tells us exactly where Daniel does his judging. It is a small 'race sensitive town', which can be crossed by car in 'half-an-hour', even in heavy traffic. With its flyovers, its industrial parks, its uneasy multi-culturalism, its illegal immigrants living in brutalist tower-blocks, and its white middle-classes retreating to their Tudorbethan closes and cul-de-sacs, it is unmistakably somewhere in the north of England. More than this we do not know.
The effect of not naming the town is to turn it into an Everywhere for modern Britain. And this suits Parks, because the serious contemporary themes he dramatises in this novel - the diminishing possibility of privacy, the place of sincerity in a culture of transience and cynicism, the difficulty of deriving value for life - are relevant to the whole country. Indeed, what Parks - a restlessly ambitious writer (this is his eleventh novel and his seventeenth book) - has tried to write here is a state-of-Britain novel. As such, it is highly unusual in recent fiction: genuinely contemporary, not interested in postmodern whimsy, nor seduced by the warm and ready embraces of history or genre.
Parks has also, excitingly, invented a new narrative style in which to tell his story. Here, there are no quotation marks and no new lines for different voices, and no differentiation is made between thought, speech, and descriptive narrative. Voices seep and bleed into one another. To make sense of the prose, we therefore have to learn a new way of reading and, like all apprenticeships, this is hard work at first. But the results are considerable.
This technique allows Parks to glide swiftly in and out of his characters' consciousnesses without the clunky gear-changes ('then x thought y', 'then z said w') that a more conventional style would demand. And this constant slippage between inner and outer perfectly suits a novel about the public-private divide, about motive, and about mens rea, the guilty mind.
Judge Savage is a work of tremendous learning and subtlety but it is by no means an easy read. It is unremittingly serious, forensic, edgy, awkward, and ultimately depressing. It diagnoses - but doesn't prescribe a cure for - the angst of the urban postmodern experience: how on earth to set the moral co-ordinates by which to plot one's life. Even a man as finely attuned to the nuances of choice and self-control as Daniel, we are shown, can't satisactorily control his own behaviour. In a novel about the collapse of judgment, Parks himself never judges Daniel. He leaves that to us.

New Statesman novel of the week

Toby Mundy

Halfway through Franz Kafka's The Trial, Josef K, by now locked irrevocably into a legal process he can neither resist nor understand, expresses his hope that "the Interrogation Commission might have discovered not that I was innocent but that I was not so guilty as they had assumed." Judge Savage is, among other things, an absorbing meditation on the same slender lines that separate guilt from innocence, chaos from order, and simplicty from complexity. Like Kafka's novel, Judge Savage explores not whether things have happened, but the hunger we have to know why. Unlike Kafka, Parks has created a gripping domestic drama through which to conduct his investigation.

Daniel Savage has recently been promoted to the position of country court judge in an unnamed English town. His elevation could be because of his ability . He has a swift and discerning intelligence - or because his public school and Oxbridge education have groomed him for establishment responsibilities. Or, in a possibility he refuses to rule out, it could be tokenism: Savage is brown-skinned and was introduced into the English middle-classes when his Brazilian mother gave him up as a child for adoption. Savage doesn't discount the option that his insecurity may have more to do with his uncertain parentage than his complexion ("Perhaps adoption was far more important than race?") Whatever their source, Savage's anxieties have made him tireless in his pursuit of women to whom he is not married.

The book opens with a memorable epigram, as Savage muses on the near-death of his marriage following the exposure of one of his affairs: "There is no life without a double life." Keeping his family together has been so traumatic that he decides to forsake his philandering ways and concentrate on his wife, Hilary, an intention he records triumphantly in his diary. But he cannot escape his former self, who reappears throughout the novel, hammering on the freshly-locked door to his past and demanding to be let in.

As he contends with his unravelling life, Savage continues his work in court. Parks uses his ongoing cases like a Greek chorus, to comment on the judge's expanding predicament.

Parks, who lives in Verona and is an accomplished essayist and translator, has written a novel of thrilling range and ambition. Although the book's cover portrays a man who face is stereotypically black and African, the novel inside the dust jacket subtly undermines the explanatory power of generalised types. Daniel Savage is black, but he is also urbane and rich - as unlike his surname as possible. Expectations are further undermined in the the courtroom: every person's story, Parks shows, is unique. Martin, Savage's oldest friend, carries with him a dreadful secret that emerges only after his death. As shock is heaped on shock, Savage's partial-sightedness is given metaphorical force by the eyepatch he is forced to wear after he is subjected to a vicious assault. The laws that once seemed to bind his middle-class group, who were so confident in their knowledge of each other, have been undone.

In law, Savage declares, "duress is a very difficult defence", but the novel shows that in life, it can be everything. When one understands the full peculiarity of a situation, it may actually become more difficult to ascribe innocence and guilt. In the worst case, one may be left understanding nothing other than that one doesn't understand.

Rough Justice

Sunday Times 16.03.03

James Eve

Recently promoted to become the first black judge on the local circuit, Daniel Savage has owned up to an affair with a colleague and resolved his marital problems with his wife Hilary. They have bought a house in the country, imagining their cosy future with their teenage children, Sarah and Tom.

And yet the neat tapestry hides a tangle of loose ends that will not be so easily tucked away. A Korean girl called Minnie, with whom Judge Savage once had an affair, starts to call him. She wants protection from her family. His daughter knows more about his womanising than he thought and is treating him with contmept. His wheeler-dealer brother calls, demanding money.

He arranges a secret meeting with Minnie's relatives to check on her well-being and they beat him into a coma. The police investigate. His wife starts asking questions and suddenly the happy version of his own life-story is standing trial. By the end of the novel he will be forced to accept a new interpretation.

Parks is no sentimentalist. He is merciless, but also absolutely convincing. The dizzying weariness of maintaining a double life has rarely been portrayed with such power. In this, he is helped by the suppleness of a prose that switches between speech and thought, from the alarming and unpredictable outer world to the mind that struggles to impose order on it. Judge Savage's disorientation as he tries to shore up his marriage never becomes our own. It is an impressive technical feat.

This is a brutal book. Parks shows his protagonist no mercy. A life, learns Judge Savage, too late, may be ugly or beautiful depending on how it is presented. As in court, you can be damned by the same facts told in a different way.

Drifting out of court

The Spectator

Gabriele Annan

By Tim Parks

Judge Savage is a dashing mixture of thriller, social comedy and dysfunctional family saga. The dust-cover is misleading. It shows a very black black in a judge’s wig, looking thoughtful and gleaming with sweat. Judge Savage is not like that at all. He is ‘almond-coloured’ (Parks doesn’t say whether with or without the shell), of mixed race, and was adopted by an English colonel and his wife who already had a son. They send both boys to Rugby and Oxford. Taxi-drivers recognise Daniel as a toff. He is as humane and good as he is clever and sceptical. His two strongest impulses are for ‘helping and leching’. The second is awkward, especially as he is devastatingly attractive to women, which gives leching a good start. He has recently been appointed crown court judge in the northern town where he lives, pipping his best friend Martin Shields to the post. This too is awkward: Martin has been his mentor since their schooldays, and Martin’s wife Christine is among his over-ardent admirers. Daniel’s wife Hilary is a musician, an intelligent, decisive woman. They have just come together after a split (she was fed up with the leching), and are buying a house outside the town, where they intend to be happier than ever before. They have two children, a furious teenage daughter, Sarah, and an ordinary, affectionate little boy called Tom who is into football and computer games.

A very great deal happens at very great speed. Daniel is dealing with two court cases. One involves eight young defendants. One of them (but which?) killed a woman by throwing a stone off a bridge over a busy road. Each has to give evidence, and Parks manages to give each his or her own voice and personality. He is a brilliant vocal mimic.

But that’s just Daniel’s professional programme. The novel bristles with other dramas. Here are a few, not necessarily in chronological order: Sarah fails her A- levels by writing obscene answers and leaves home in a rage against her parents. Martin descends into depression, physical sickness, hospital, death. Daniel gives the funeral oration. Hilary discovers more infidelities and leaves him again, taking Tom with her. Christine tries harder but unsuccessfully to seduce him. She turns out to be a virgin. No wonder: she and Daniel discover Martin’s photograph collection of paedo-pics. Daniel consoles himself with a prostitute and a crown prosecution solicitor. There are money problems about the new house. He moves in with his facetious, déclassé brother, Frank, who runs an antiques stall with his gay partner.

All this is interwoven with the main plot. Seven years earlier, Daniel had seduced a young Korean girl called Minnie. Her parents forced her to marry another Korean, and she hasn’t seen Daniel since. Suddenly, she starts telephoning him for help. He meets her in a café. On the way home he is mugged from behind: he doesn’t get to see his attackers. After several operations and blind in one eye, he emerges from hospital as a national hero: the attack is seen as racialist, and he is awarded the MBE (rather a humble honour for a judge). He turns it down anyway, afraid that his sexual misdemeanours will be dug up by the tabloids, especially when Minnie arrives in his hotel (Frank got tired of sheltering him). She is pregnant and badly beaten up and dies on his bed. Still, he is already resigned to losing his job. His life is falling apart: his career is on the point of collapse, his wife and children have left him.

Then everything comes right through the machinations of a friendly police chief whom he has always regarded as hostile. Plus Sarah has returned home, and Hilary wants him back too. He doesn’t seem pleased, though, with this startling and gratifying (you’d think) denouement. ‘Everything has been removed from me,’ he complains in the last paragraph. He has lost control of his life — and readers might feel they’ve lost the plot.

It doesn’t matter that much. The novel is still a virtuoso piece, a tour de force, highly enjoyable because the characters are so alive, often so funny (as convincing as the story is not), the milieus so vivid, the hero so attractive, and so good at analysing his own and other people’s feelings and motives. Besides, it is a p.c. novel (about racism especially) that pokes fun at p.c.-ness. Just like the hero of Parks’s earlier novel Europa, who campaigned against cliché, Daniel defines and demolishes kitsch. ‘This hymn’, he thinks at Martin’s funeral, ‘is purest kitsch. We wrap ourselves in purest kitsch … when there’s nothing we can do.’ This seems an original idea worth thinking about. The novel is full of them — too full, maybe — but one must feel grateful for Parks’s reckless generosity. Return

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