In the autumn of 2004, shortly after his memorable interview with the President of the United States and following the publication of his elder son’s novelised autobiography, cruelly entitled Under His Shadow, celebrity journalist, broadcaster and documentary film-maker Harold Cleaver boarded a British Airways flight from London Gatwick to Milan Malpensa, proceeded by Italian railways as far as Bruneck in the South Tyrol and thence by taxi, northwards, to the village of Luttach only a few kilometres from the Austrian border, from whence he hoped to find some remote mountain habitation in which to spend the next, if not necessarily the last, years of his life. Ratting on your responsibilities, had been Amanda’s interpretation. She is the mother of his children. The responsibilities of a man at my time of life, the eminent and overweight Cleaver told his partner of thirty years, can be no more than financial, and, acting on a decision taken only hours before, he signed over to her a very considerable sum of money of which neither she nor their three surviving children could possibly have any immediate need, with the exception perhaps of the younger son Phillip who was always in need, but never accepted anything.
      The following morning, climbing on the train to Gatwick, still rather dazed to find himself taking such a momentous step, Cleaver switched off his two cell phones. This is not just another of your many projects, he repeated to himself. He was sitting opposite a young man cradling a CD player, his lips silently singing. You are not, as has been the case on other extended trips, planning to write a book, or to make a documentary. The young man, he noticed, had a glazed look in his eyes. He hasn’t recognised me, thank God. The CD player was whirring. The culture, such as it may turn out to be, Cleaver told himself firmly, of the South Tyrol need not be analysed, ironised, criticised or eulogised. A recorded voice warned that the doors were about to close. The business of living in a remote mountain cabin need not be dramatised or serialised. Nor turned into a sort of Walden. The train began to move. The Thames was suddenly beneath, then behind. The familiar sprawl of South London accelerated away.
      Nor can there be any question of recommending anything to anybody, Cleaver was still reflecting an hour later as the airport shuttle took him to Terminal Two, or of reporting home on any wisdom supposedly acquired. He was lucky to be able to purchase a ticket for almost immediate departure. I have no baggage, he declared. Nothing. Nothing, Cleaver finally muttered, as he adjusted a safety belt to his girth, will be brought back from this trip for insertion in the national debate. For so many years a master of the public voice, he would now leave it behind. Such is the extraordinary idea that has somehow thrust itself upon Harold Cleaver during these last few days of remarkable public notoriety and intense private turmoil: I must shut my big mouth.

...and a review

IRISH TIMES

March 11, 2006 Saturday

Eileen Battersby

The hills are alive with the sound of chaos

Never has the need to empty one's mind been as convincingly, or as brilliantly, illustrated as in Tim Parks's full-blooded Cleaver. In a career spanning more than 20 years, and 13 novels, this most deliberate and underrated of English writers has consistently entered the more unattractive corners of human consciousness, with increasingly sophisticated and mature results. Never overly concerned with style, he is instead a no-nonsense writer who invariably has something to say and tends to say it with robust candour, few apologies and a mastery of controlled indignation.
The narrative opens almost as reportage with its central character, Harold Cleaver, a successful journalist and larger-than-life public figure, on the retreat. Just as he should be buoyed high by having humiliated the US president in a high-profile television interview, Cleaver suffers the uncomfortable sensation of public scrutiny on the publication of his son's embarrassingly autobiographical novel.
Parks is studying a man who, through all forms of material excess and sexual excess, has in one dramatic leap, resigned his job, left mid-life crisis far behind and is instead running scared from the chaos in his head.
At no time is Cleaver presented as the buffoon or a caricature which he so easily could have become. Martin Amis would have had enormous, linguistically charged fun with material such as this - remember John Self in Money? But Manchester-born and Italian-based Parks is not like that.
As he has demonstrated in the finest of his novels, the Booker shortlisted Europa (1997), Destiny (1999), Judge Savage (2003) and now in Cleaver, he is interested in human behaviour at its messiest and he explores this squalor with disciplined measures of anger, realism, humour and humanity.
Cleaver emerges as a wholly believable monster, the product of fame and the suffocating freedom it imposes. Reading his son's novel provides the spur which sets him off on a trip to the mountains. It sounds penitential; he takes only the clothes he is wearing and heads off, determined not to use his mobile phones
Harold Cleaver, big-shot journalist, of course has more than one. Left in his wake is Amanda, his sparring partner of some 30 years and the mother of their four children, including the novelist son. There was also the beautiful daughter who died tragically. Amanda and Cleaver have never married yet her hold on him is as tenacious as is his determination to do as he pleases and remain faithfully unfaithful.
Cleaver, a divided and divisive character living up to his name, takes flight. The journey is well described, Cleaver leaves London and lands in Milan before setting off for the South Tyrol and the Austrian border. Parks makes good use of the geographic contrasts, Cleaver may as well have arrived in Mars. The Alpine setting is copybook picturesque, neither he nor the locals can understand a word of each other.
Having initially settled in an inn run by a silent, concerned woman, Cleaverdecides he needs complete solitude and wants to find a place high in the mountains.
His new home is acquired somewhat abruptly through the death of its previous inhabitant. On moving in, Cleaver finds he has not only inherited the old man's dog, several members of the deceased's obvious troubled family seem to come with the tenancy. Throughout the narrative Parks makes good use of mixing the past and present tenses.
Cleaver is not only trying to sort out his head, he wants to lose some weight and hopefully reduce his chances of an impending heart attack. He is also endeavouring to keep his sexual urges at bay. Touches of what could have been zany comedy hover on the sidelines; though for all the humour - and this is a humorous book - Parks has serious intentions.
In terms of technique, this is an impressive performance. Parks describes the physical world revolving around his anti- hero. He also enters Cleaver's scrambled thoughts ranging from his triumphant dismantling of the US president to irksome passages from his son's novel cataloguing Cleaver's irritating mannerisms; Cleaver's sexual career, the death of his daughter and the oppressive levels of resentment and regret that have brought him to his mountain retreat.
While his mind races, his body lumbers about, slipping in the snow, twisting his ankle, and getting a painful splinter of wood in his hand. It is a textured telling, this is a three dimensional narrative that lives off the page.
Somewhere out in the snow there is another presence. It could be Cleaver's paranoia, but instead it is his son. In the closing stages of this lively, intelligent novel of multiple ironies that reiterates the quality of Europa, Destiny and Judge Savage - all very fine novels - Parks introduces several twists and turns, and potential plot developments. In his avoidance of easy resolutions lies the achievement of the Everyman-in-chaos novel his readers were waiting for Parks to write - and he has.

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