Comes a time when you need a different kind of adventure…

Seven or eight years ago, to help pass a holiday in England, I booked my kids into a kayak course on the Thames. Watching them from a bridge as they learned to paddle and then to turn the boat upside down and escape, and then to roll it back up again, I decided they were having a lot more fun than I was. The following week I did the course myself.

There were two adults and twenty adolescents. It was the beginning of a long passion. At first you notice only the boat and the water. You learn to stay upright. So many of the movements are counter instinctive. Then you move on to white water and learn to read the rapids and the eddies. You discover the strange conjuring trick of turning a boat upright when your helmet is banging on rocks and your can see nothing and the current is tearing at your paddle. How did I ever learn to stay calm in these situations? Finally, you begin to notice the people who choose canoeing…

There are the youngsters who want to show off. There are the leaders who prove their manliness on the water while their private lives are a series of hedged bets and phobic retreats. There are the scoutmasters and the rebels, the girls sticking close to their boyfriends, the parents admiring their children. And there are those who have turned the sport into a religion, who find in the canoe club their main source of community and companionship. When you go away for a week together to some dangerous white-water river in the Alps all these people start to react to each other in quite extraordinary ways.

Rapids is a book about the beauty of the mountains and the excitement of the river, about people who wouldn’t usually meet being thrust together in dramatic situations. Above all, it explores the tension between the escapism of extreme sports, the thirst for a very simple and straightforward kind of adventure, and the more painful and perplexing realities of love, bereavement and political commitment. The person who feels the need for a different kind of adventure, is telling you something about his life…

the first page...

This isn’t the right world, he told her. For us. He unrolled a sleeping bag and laid down on the planks. Be strong, he said. Earlier, immediately on their return, they had tried out the stretch downstream from Sand im Taufers. Filthy cities, Clive muttered. Michela looked taller and slimmer in her wetsuit beneath the large backdrop of the Alps, if possible, even younger. Filthy Milanese, he insisted, pulling tight his spraydeck. Old misanthrope! she laughed. She was happy. It was right to go, she said, I don’t regret it at all, but great to be back.

So it was. They seal-launched from the bank. The river was high. It slid solid beneath the bridge. She knew she loved him and so was thinking only of the practical arrangements: the campsite, the pitches, the food, the equipment. This is the big day. These are her duties. I hope they don’t bring any basket cases, she called. Clive was already away downstream. He broke in and out of the swift flow. The merest hint of an eddy was refuge enough. He was so stable on the flood. He used so few paddle strokes, so little energy. Michela darted behind. She was aware that basket case was his expression. She was aware of emulating his deft certainty in the strong water. It’s not my element yet. Clive broke out again. His yellow boat slewed to stop with its prow in only a handkerchief of stillness behind the lure of something submerged. The river tugged by. Move off! she called. The current was faster. Make room! He shook his head. He was laughing. The eddy was too small for two. Meanie! Now she must take the rapids first.

Suddenly alone, the river’s horizon comes to meet you. There’s a certain glassiness to it and as the roar swells the water grows more compact, it pulls more earnestly. The mountains around and above are quite still. Already you are past the point of no return. You must choose your spot. Michela knows the right place, slightly left of centre. But just before the plunge, she sees it has changed in their week away. The river is constantly changing. A rock has gone under. A heavy log is caught in the larger boil of the stopper. Perhaps still in the spell of last week’s drama, or half focused on the group that will arrive this evening, she tries at the last second to change her line. She isn’t used to leading. It’s a mistake. The surface is already curving down. The pull is fierce. She throws in a sharp paddle stroke on the right to avoid the log, tries to straighten on the left. But already she’s in the quick of it. Not quite in line with the current, the kayak is sucked abruptly back into the stopper, sideways to the flood.

For a second the young woman allows the elements to take over. A moment’s inattention is more than enough. The water pounds on the spraydeck, forcing her head down into the rush. Her helmet bangs on the log. The red kayak spins on its axis. Her face is under now, in the foam. Again the helmet grates. But Michela is calm and lucid. She is always calm when it actually happens, when she’s gone below and the world is blurred and swirling dark...

and the reviews...

Short takes

Intriguing and triumphant... the narrative is spontaneious, and has an unpredicable pace that bears the characters along like the river it descrives so expertly
The Daily Telegraph

The novel sings... Parks's writing takes on an even greater immediacy and urgency
The Sunday Times

The trick to story-telling is knowing when to disappoint a reader's expectations; Tim Parks is a master at it... He is a writer of considerable intelligence and great technical skill... Tremendously readable.
The Guardian

London Standard

by Jane Carr

Monday 21 February, 2005

Tim Parks has a talent for finding new veins of language to mine, troves of words that are fresh and glistening, still powerful when so much literary vocabulary feels hackneyed and stale. In A Season with Verona, about Parks' fanatical support for his local football team, blasts of vitriolic Italian swearing scandalise and thrill the reader, even when comprehension falters. One of his earlier novels, Shear, draws on the specialised terminology of quarrying to provide metaphors of schism and disturbance. Now, with his new novel, Rapids, Parks has discovered the language of kayaking.

No one, reading Rapids, could doubt that its author has not merely dipped his toe in the water of his latest subject matter, but has launched himself - literally - into the treacherous rivers of the Alto Adige, Italy's portion of the Alps. Not only has Parks made the vivid language of the sport work beautifully for him, but his descriptions of "reading" a river descent, of responding to the dangers hidden beneath the surface of a swelling torrent, of narrowly avoiding death, have all the authenticity of lived experience. Kayakers and canoeists the world over will scramble to read this thrilling account of their sport.

But Rapids is much more than one man in a boat. It is a deftly plotted tale in which an ensemble of characters act out their parts in a complex and absorbing weave of interactions. Clive and Michela, he English, she Italian (but feeling that she should have been born English - a transnational?) have invested a risky amount of money in setting up a canoe-holiday business. Their first clients are about to arrive: a group from a club in England whose ages range from teens to middle-aged and whose relationships are already full of complications.

Clive isn't in it for the money. His passion for white water is fused with his despair at global warming. As the book opens, he is traumatised by what he has just witnessed at an anti-globalisation demo in Milan. On the first night, he tells the group that "the work we're trying to do here is part of the same campaign - to help people respect the world before it's too late."

With temperatures rising unnaturally, the glaciers are in retreat and the rivers have become unpredictable: they are "paddling on the snows of centuries back, the blizzards of the Middle Ages." In this respect, Rapids is Tim Parks' most Italian novel to date: no longer is he writing as the Englishman surprised and occasionally alienated by his borrowed homeland, sometimes poking fun; instead he seems to have taken on board not only Italy's concerns about the state of the planet (or their bit of it, at least), but its very style of caring. His sympathies are, it seems, with straggly-haired Clive.

The guest canoeists, a mixed bunch of English semi-eccentrics, are joined by the recently bereaved Vince and his likeable fourteen-year-old daughter (there are, perhaps inevitably when the English camp out, faint shades of Mike Leigh's Nuts in May). From the melee of teen entanglements and adult power struggles, Vince emerges as the character Parks is most interested in. Vince is a banker and as such the target of Clive and Michela's barbs, yet he offers lucid counter-arguments to their critique of the system: not all financial dealings are evil and Vince himself has built his career on his probity. "The morality is in the honesty of representation," he declares, and perhaps this could stand as Tim Parks' motto too.

In the course of their week's stay, the canoeists brave the torrents and face their demons - it's a white-knuckle ride. Clive and Michaela's relationship hits the rocks. The reader is immersed in the various dramas. So wildly productive of metaphors and similes is the setting of this novel that Parks almost runs the risk of capsizing his story in the flood of watery imagery. But ultimately, it is robustly appropriate to the powerful storylines playing themselves out, and the reader feels the same sense of resolution as the kayakers when the novel plunges through the last set of falls and floats out into the calm end-stretch, known to canoeists, appropriately enough, as the "get-out point".

With Rapids, Tim Parks demonstrates, once again, that he is a supremely confident storyteller. He creates his characters (a whole minibus-full of them), delivers them into a nail-biting set-up and lets them go. In language as refreshing as it is memorable, he interrogates the deep currents of human experience, while never losing his ability to entertain and excite.

In the white water

By Lewis Jones

Sunday Telegraph 27/02/2005

In Parks's new novel - his 12th - is an intriguing and triumphant oxymoron; a dance of micro and macro, of yin and yang; a ping-pong game between well-matched opponents.

It follows a group of Brits abroad - six adults, nine adolescents, deftly sketched and amusingly contrasted - on a week's kayaking course in the white water of the Aurino river in the South Tyrol. These quotidian, predominantly urban lives are thrown into relief by their foreign pastoral, the forced intimacy of a campsite, the rigours and dangers of the rapids.

Characters are tested, priorities re-examined, relationships broken and formed. A timid teenager becomes bold. A young couple splits up. A chinless scoutmaster is slapped in the face. A middle-aged banker loses the trust of his daughter, revises his opinion of his dead wife, falls in love, and wonders if he can ever return to his bank. The volatile certainties of youth are nicely balanced against the adamantine doubts of maturity.

On this level, the story is a variant on the Ship of Fools theme. Though formally collectivised - the group is divided into three teams, the Louts, the Pigs and the Slobs - as individuals Parks's characters are ultimately alone, atomised, so many Kayaks of Fools.

At the same time, the larger world intrudes in various ways. It's the hottest summer on record. In France, old people are dying in droves, and in the Italian Alps the glacier-fed river is bursting and racing with wild melt-water - "the snows of centuries back, the blizzards of the Middle Ages" - which makes it more hazardous and prompts urgent consideration of the greenhouse effect. On a hike into the foothills, the party contemplates the surrounding peaks, "at once awesome and vulnerable": "Your instinct was to shiver at the majesty, yet you were being told you had destroyed it."

The host and course leader is Clive, a bearded, irascible and relentlessly didactic figure who has set up the school with Michela, his adoring Italian girlfriend-disciple. Clive has just run the gauntlet of police truncheons in the anti-globalisation demonstrations in Milan, and is en route for Berlin, where he will chain himself to railings and turn himself, perhaps, into a human bomb. While driving Michela nearly mad, he provokes his flock to hot debate about multinationals, Third World debt and so on.

It sounds formulaic when analysed, but the narrative is spontaneous, and has an unpredictable pace that bears the characters along like the river it describes so expertly, alternating between placidity and surprise, racing, as the paddlers gain in skill and confidence, to a helter-skelter climax. It might sound rather earnest, too, but it's often bleakly funny.

To begin with, I jibbed slightly at the technical minutiae of kayaking - the splashdecks and helicopter rolls - but soon became enthralled and exhilarated by the dramatic negotiation of eddies, pour-overs, stoppers and holes. Parks is excellent both at the practice of white-water canoeing and at the motivation behind it. People who do dangerous things on rivers and mountains, argues one character, do so out of fear, "afraid of life beginning… afraid it will never begin… They're things people do instead of living… To feel they're really living, when they're not in danger of living at all."

The prose is as deceptive as the river. Switching cunningly between past and present historic tenses, disdaining quotation marks so that speech is submerged in the flow, casual and colloquial to the point of drabness, suddenly it plunges, boils and soars into descriptive poetry.

Here is the banker, for instance, taking stock of his surroundings: "Above the tents and the coloured clutter of the campsite, he lifts his eyes to climb solid slopes rising steeply through gleaming meadow and dark pine to shreds of bright cloud that drift among barren walls of rock."

Parks has often written about Brits in Italy, where he has lived since 1981, teaching, translating (particularly Alberto Moravia, whose influence is evident here) and raising an Italian family. In several of his novels - notably his big hit, Europa (1997) - he has tackled the themes of group dynamics, and the clash of the private and the political. In Rapids he has excelled himself.

Deep waters run fast

David Robson, Sunday Telegraph, 20/3/05

This is the novel that Tim Parks was born to write. He sets a pace as a narrator which none of his contemporaries can match, driving his stories forward at helter-skelter speed, capturing the complexity of everyday life through the quicksilver brilliance of his writing. Rapidity is his stock-in-trade.

It is an idiosyncratic approach to novel-writing and, at its worst, can seem breathless and artificial. But Rapids marks a near-perfect marriage of style and content. The setting is the Tyrol, the context a white-water canoeing holiday: six adults, nine adolescents, thrown together in a four-day adventure holiday in which they risk life and limb in the surging, glacier-fed waters. It is a terrific, bravura tale. I do not know another writer living who could marshal a cast of this size within such a vivid, fast-moving narrative.

As the waters roar and the canoes hurtle downstream, the principals start to emerge from the foam: Clive, the bearded expedition leader, and his Italian girlfriend Michaela; portly Keith, an ageing Boy Scout type, trying to keep the younger ones in order; alpha male Adam and his insecure son Mark; precious student Max, with his lazy, knee-jerk witticisms; widowed banker Vince, desperate to bond with his teenage daughter, Louise.

You know, without needing to be told, that the trip will bring triumph and disaster; and you read on compulsively, curious what fate Parks has in store for which character. This is no holiday in the sun. These waters are dangerous.

You would think such a hectic story would necessarily comprise swiftly drawn vignettes; but in Vince, a middle-aged man at the crossroads, there is at least one fully achieved portrait. As a banker, he is at odds with the younger, capitalism-despising members of the group. As a widower, he is haunted by the memory of his wife. As a first-time white-water canoeist, he is desperate to prove himself to his sceptical daughter. Everything about the character rings true, and his emergence from the fortress of timidity and repression into a fuller humanity is the best thing in the book.

The ending, for me, is not totally convincing. Parks lets his sentimentality run away with him, pairing off two of the main characters. But the novel as a whole has a magnificent, thrilling urgency.

Current affairs in a river of life

By Tim Lott, The Independent., 4 March 2005

The river as a metaphor for life is hardly an original one. With its still surface and threatening undertows, its fluidity and evanescence, its rapids and hazards, no analogy has ever possessed such utility for expressing the process and the mystery of being. It takes a truly outstanding writer to take such a well-worn device and make it fresh and urgent. Fortunately, Tim Parks is such a writer, and Rapids is a thrilling white-water ride, not only through the landscape of the Italian Alps, but also through the quirks and eddies of the human heart.

Parks starts with a simple, but promising premise. Six adults and nine adolescents come together on a white-water "community experience", on a swelling, glacier-fed river. Some are intimates, some are strangers, some acquaintances.

The group leaders, Clive and Michaela, are political idealists and estranged lovers, and the emotional tensions that pervade their relationship seep down into the group and transform an innocent pleasure trip into something darker, and eventually, chilling.

The other central player among the well-drawn cast of characters is Vince, a middle-aged banker whose wife - an accomplished kayaker herself - has died. He comes with his teenage daughter, Louise, whom he feels pulling away from him in the wake of their bereavement. Vince's carefully ordered and responsible life suddenly feels fragile and empty. Somehow he hopes the white-water trip may bring some coherence. More than any other character, he is seeking re-invention, and a conquering of his own fears. But the resolution of this quest comes in a way he can never have anticipated.

Parks sets himself a difficult task. Handling 15 characters within such an enclosed sphere is a challenge; making that large cast both convincing and engrossing is highly tricky. Also, translating such a visual and visceral experience as white-water kayaking into language is a hurdle, and sometimes I felt that to bring knowledge of water terminology - "white holes", lines, pour-overs and suchlike - to the book would be a real advantage. But, on the whole, Parks overcomes these difficulties deftly and skilfully. Even when you can't quite work out what's going on, or who's who, a sense of excitement at the action charges the text, and you are pulled remorselessly into the heart of the narrative.

This being Tim Parks, Rapids is far, far more than an adventure novel, but also a brilliant unfolding of personalities, secret intentions, thwarted ambitions and petty vanities. The teenagers are indulging in other rites of passage than simply risk-taking on the river, as they cast about for sexual adventure.

Clive's idealism is challenged by the cynical Adam. Michaela is desperately trying to keep her faith in Clive, and she starts to seek conquests in retribution. Most of the adults, one way or another, are adrift, while the teenagers are somehow more resilient, or oblivious to the powerful forces tugging at their lives.

Rapids manages to be not only a social and psychological but a political novel. Parks even-handedly examines the gap between action and ideology, as the waters swell around them as a result of the global warming that is melting the glacier. Disaster threatens the kayakers, and the globe: they, and we, deny the truth about ourselves and the world at our peril.

Rapids would not be out of place on the Whitbread and the Booker shortlists. Immensely readable and deeply intelligent, it confirms Tim Parks as one of our foremost authors, one whose depth of talent continues to refresh and shock and, finally, like the water itself, scour and purify.

purchases...

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