my view of it...
This was the last, I think, of the seven or eight books I wrote before being published. I remember telling myself I would give up if this one didn't make it. Doubt if I would though. Writing had become a habit. Anyhow, that creeping desperation certainly conditioned the novel in all kinds of ways. Most of all there was the first page. I sat down one evening and wrote, 'Roger lay on the carpet'… and it was immediately evident that he was dead and that his girlfriend had killed him. That should wake them up, I thought. I wrote the first ten pages in just a few hours, then put the thing away for more than a year. The problem was I had chosen to write in the girlfriend's voice. It seemed important not to tell the story in the man's voice, it would too easily have become mine, especially since Roger was to be a failed writer. But having got the first pages down I wasn't sure I could carry it off for a whole novel. What made it possible, and full of fun was the decision to set the book in the ridiculous office I'd worked in for a year or so after university. A really crazy place. As soon as I realised that Roger and Anna had been executive and secretary in my old company, it all made sense. I pricked up my ears for old cadences and went for it, not realising that I'd hit upon what would be the major subject of the later books: the way an embattled relationship, a relationship between people who love but cannot understand, can, ironically, confer an enormous sense of purpose and even destiny, if only because one is constantly seeking to overcome the obstacle of the other person's resistance. These are the hardest relationships to let go. In the end, Anna has to resort to the kitchen knife.
'With his chillingly elegant prose and frighteningly deadpan narrative, Tim Parks has written, not a whodunnit, but a brilliant whydunnit'
'This novel is a mordantly illuminating essay on the way love contains the seeds of vindictiveness and hatred'
'A tautly constructed love story full of passion and tenderness'
Jo-Ann Goodwin - TLS, 17th, October, 1986
Anna is a typist at TT, remarkable only for her ordinariness. She lives with her patents, who remain deep in mourning for her brother, Brian, killed in a car crash years ago. Anna's feelings are important to no one but herself. She remains cramped into a tiny box room, Brian's spacious bedroom next door maintained by her parents as a shrine. Her boyfriend, Malcolm. whom she has been seeing since the third year at school. digs up worms from her parents' garden to use for fish bait; and constantly but unenthusiastically suggests that they should many.
In the midst of this mediocrity and boredom, Roger Cruikshank arrives to work as a typesetting executive at TT. Tall, blond. Middle-class and egotistical, he seems to Anna to have stepped from the pages of the romantic novels she constantly reads. The relationship they embark on is conducted in terms of deepest secrecy Only Neville, Roger's closest friend and a Cambridge academic, is avowed to know of their mutual involvement. When Anna becomes pregnant. Neville is the only outsider to know the identity of the baby's father.
As the novel proceeds, the pressures engendered by the relationship become increasingly hard to control. Roper goes to America on behalf of TT and is. predictably, unfaithful. Anna, left alone to endure her pregnancy and the birth of the child, examines her commitment to Roger and begins to -understand the dangerous nature of her feelings. We realize that her self-assertion will be violent, bloody and irresistible.
In Loving Roger Tim Parks exhibits an astonishing control over the tone of his writing, and it is this discipline which makes the novel such an impressive achievement. Roger is a nightmare of self-regard, his attraction to Anna partly physical, but largely based on his desire to "write". He regards her as an excellent source of material - she recounts the office gossip, which he intends to use in a play, with an honesty and perception that Roger finds fetching and surprising.
The bulk of the novel is written in the first person, and it is the voice of Anna we hear explaining her obsession, describing the humiliation and anger she feels with the same honesty which so amazes Roger, Anna is a triumph: her experience points to the truism that none of us is ordinary. Even those who read The Far Pavilions are also capable of anguish. Those who ignore this do so, as in Roger's case, at their peril.
It is Roger, for all his pretensions to artistic status, for all the hours spent at the typewriter composing his poems and plays, who is ultimately mundane. The excerpts from his diaries are characterized by an entirely adolescent desire for self-dramatization. Therein lies the core of the problem; Anna is an adult, and Roger simply refuses to accept life on adult terms, insisting on remaining a sort of enfant terrible, living by a set of rules formulated at school and university: all of which will lead, inevitably, to the violent denouement of the novel,
And here's Frank Kermode in a much later article in the London Review of Books (November 4th, 1993).
Thinking of the earlier books, one might have been content to speak merely of control of tone. In Loving Roger, for instance, the narrator is a young woman, Anna, though there are interpolated diary passages and letters by her young man. In this book the pleasure of the big bang at the end is renounced, or rather transferred to the beginning, as in a detective story: the young man Roger is already lying dead on the floor of the girl's bedsit on page 1, and we are only to find out why this happened. So there's not going to be a blaze - Parks rather likes big fires - or some other terminal catastrophe. Roger's death is overdetermined, rather dreamlike (Parks goes in for lost of dreams, rather more persuasively than some). And since the girl is good, intelligent, but by the insecurely snobbish standards of her lover uneducated, lovable because simple or even vulgar, the writer, by using her voice, has renounced not only the more convenient male organ but also the cultural and linguistic refinements available to the Cambridge male graduate. The interpolated, arty, self-pitying prose of Roger is there partly because it provides an illuminating contrast with Anna's, whose favourite reading - The Thorn Birds, The Far Pavilions may be held to have debased her sensibility but has no effect whatever on her sensible way of talking.
This is not just a trick, but evidence of seriousness. Loving Roger is about a relationship that is in itself not unusual, and sexually satisfactory, but which is bound to come to grief, for reasons that have nothing to do with sex but much to do with gender, snobbery and character. Roger wants to be a playwright but for the time-being works in an office. Anna works there too, but as a secretary, and the division between executive and secretary is absolute, except when the executives take the secretaries to bed. The basic story, the private tragedy is in complicated dialogue with the conditions of a conventionally un
-moral world, as inevitable as offices are, with their hierarchies, gossips and flirts; a world in which all are in a sense innocent until forced into a sphere where innocence is no defence, where young men and women are, without immediate penalty, at once scared and assertive, serious and treacherous, loving and unfaithful.
Roger is delighted to have a baby but not keen even then to move in with its mother, a woman he despises not only for her choice of reading matter and her sentimentality, but for her parents. The baby is great, but he has to think of his career objectives; if this quite passionate and valid relationship interfered with them everyone, he persuades himself, would regret it. 'He said we had to be very careful not to come to grief with getting too attached to each other'. Anna's reflection on this statement is more penetrating than anything in Roger's own self-examination in his journals and letters: 'he didn't want life to be real till hehad decided so.' Occasionally he catches, but does not hold, a hint that she is really more intelligent, as well as much simpler and much more honest, than he is. In his diary he writes: 'One notes, in passing, the strong sense of disbelief that one is really alive, one is really in a situation with other people, a situation where one is obliged to do things, where history, of akind, is being made.' Reading this diary entry, Anna says: 'Obviously anybody who uses phrases like "one notes in passing" at this point, isn't going to do anything at all.'
There are other well-placed indications of the kind of world we are contemplating - the commonplace, lecherous, giggly world; the world of the affected and ambiguous undergraduate friendship, prolonged in envy and used against the girl; the world also, of the single parent. But the girl doesn't merely live in the ordinary world, she knows how to value it, understands how it is possible for people to live in it with untroubled consciences from day to ordinary day, yet be driven to commit the rather extraordinary act of murder as if, despite appearances, it were brought on in the ordinary way of things, people and the world being what, in the end, the are. To do all that Parks had to write very carefully in a rather low style, a proof of ventriloquial skill, and an indication of his courage. The book conducts its dialogue with the world while risking rejection as one more unadventurous, over-domesticated, modern English novel.
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