On reception of his mother’s brief phone call announcing his father’s death, John James took a deep breath, booked himself onto the first available flight for Delhi, had Elaine drive him to Heathrow, travelled towards the coming night and arrived at Indira Gandhi Airport to find the weather much cooler than expected. The funeral was to be the following morning. His mother was not in the apartment, but the elderly maid let him in and told him that Mrs James had gone as usual to the clinic. “To clinic,” she said. “Madam has gone to clinic.” John put his bag in the one spare room and sat on the bed. He stared at the bookshelves and sighed. Shall I take a shower? Suddenly he felt a loss of momentum, a faint giddiness. No, the important thing was to see Dad’s body.

John stood up and went back to the kitchen where the maid was sweeping the floor. Did she have a phone number, he asked, for his mother? A mobile or work phone? The woman’s head wobbled as she looked at him. She seemed to have trouble understanding. John repeated the question. “I need to phone my mother, at the clinic.” “Clinic,” the woman said, her head still wobbling. She began to give directions for how to get there. She used her arms, miming a person going out of a door and turning right. John decided the walk would do him good and set off.

Outside, despite the cooler temperature, there was the same glazed and glaring light he remembered from other trips east, the same sour smell in the air, the same odd mix of frenetic traffic, road¬side cooking, languid animals and persistent beggars. He liked it. He felt on holiday. I work too hard, he decided. This would blow away the cobwebs.

Somebody tried to sell him postcards of the old town, trinkets, necklaces, sacred images. He smiled and shook his head. But he couldn’t find the clinic. The broad streets seemed one block of buildings after another, some at considerable distances, all enclosed by decaying red walls. There were big trees between the buildings and swarms of crows cawing in the foliage. John pulled a mobile from his pocket and texted Elaine: “Can you believe it! Mum not home, and left no phone number. Now I’m getting lost looking for her. Wish you were here. Kisses. J.”

John’s father had died of cancer, but the end had come unexpectedly soon. From what John had found about prostate cancer, there should have been no immediate concern. Even in India, such things could be kept at bay for many years. Some westerners actually went to Delhi for cheaper operations. And Dad could always have come back to the UK if he needed special treatment. “John, your father died this morning,” his mother had said. He hadn’t been able to gauge her voice. He had been in the basement lab at the Centre; the centrifuge was noisy and the signal poor. But she certainly wasn’t crying. Mum was a tough one. And his own response had been quiet to say the least. He hadn’t wept. He wasn’t close to weeping. So all Dad’s famous research has come to nothing; those were the first words that crossed his mind. It didn’t upset him. Rather the contrary, as if something poignant had been sensibly cut short.

Only talking to Elaine, did he manage to feel the drama of it. “Oh my God, John,” she cried. “My God! John!” She forgot her own problems. There was the flight to arrange. “How awful - you must check if your visa is still valid. It’s so sudden. The poor thing, your poor mother!” Was she going to bury him out there? Surely not. And what about money? That John had nothing in his current account was common knowledge. He used his credit card to pay for the flight. “What about the future, though: your poor mother, your allowance?” Elaine found a cash dispenser and insisted he accept two hundred pounds, though she too was living off her parents.

Yet all this urgent talk, John sensed as they drove to the airport, was just buzz. His girlfriend was getting a chance to see how her man reacted in a crisis and to show how practical and sensible she could be. He adored her, but this was theatre. She was playing. Her vocation was theatre after all. Everything dramatic was fun for Elaine.

No, the only significant thought, he realised now, of these twenty-four hours that had followed his mother’s phone call, had been the knowledge that he would never see his father again. The words had come to him on the plane. They had been showing a movie in Hindi about a man who was supposed to be marrying one woman but in fact was very evidently in love with another who, for reasons John hadn’t grasped, was quite unsuitable. “You will never see him again,” he suddenly found himself muttering.

The moment the words came into his head he felt a fresh alertness. It was much sharper than the phone-call or anything Mother had said. Then, trying to picture his father, while at the same time watching the film, because the girls were pretty and he liked the brilliant colours and a certain charming artificiality you get in these Indian romances, he realised that there was no image of Dad in his mind: greenish grey eyes, lanky, balding from the front, sandy hair, fine nose, a slightly distracted, sometimes aloof air. It wasn’t much more than an identikit. Or not even. I won’t see Dad again, he thought. And he decided that the first thing he must do on arrival in Delhi was view his father’s body. He would see his dead father and fix the man in his memory for life to come. Except that now, wandering down a broad avenue of New Delhi with dry grass waving on the verges and here and there destitutes wrapped in rags, he couldn’t find Mother’s clinic; he didn’t know where his father was.

A few short quotes from reviews

Independent on Sunday, Henry Sutton: ‘the originality, power and sheer prolificacy of Parks’s production makes the work of his British contemporaries appear trite… His prose can be sparse and lucid, or almost manically convoluted, although beyond the fierce and questioning intelligence are both humour and artfully constructed and invariably gripping plots… Dreams of Rivers and Seas, unlike his previous work, has the bonus of the Delhi backdrop, coupled with accessible prose. In other words it’s a big, easily readable book – though with a solidly intellectual core – more than ripe for big prizes.’

Times, Neel Mukherjee ‘gripping and ambiguous… India provides the gritty, realistic backdrop, a lightning conductor for intelligent Westerners to play out the manufactured anguishes of their fissile lives.’

Evening Standard, Nirpal Dhaliwal: ‘a brave book…he shows with this novel, he intimately understands the Western condition, its complexity and fragility’

Sunday Telegraph, Jane Shilling Dreams of Rivers and Seas is a love story (or rather several love stories), an oblique and engrossing mystery, but above all a story about language and its limitations.’

And this is from The Guardian, Saturday, 9th August 08...

Double trouble in Delhi

Indra Sinha acclaims Tim Parks's haunting study of anthropology and emotion

Tim Parks prefaces Dreams of Rivers and Seas with a message to his prospective readers: "Those familiar with [the anthropologist and linguist] Gregory Bateson and his work will realise that I have used elements from his life and writings to create the character of Albert James . . . Readers who want to find out about [Bateson's] remarkable work should certainly not consult these pages, which are entirely fictional."

Albert is already dead when the story opens, but his character dominates every page. Although he had lived frugally in Delhi with his doctor wife, he was a world-renowned epistemologist, a great mind who thought differently from the rest of us. His conversation was a brilliant melange of concepts and ideas drawn from biology, anthropology, kinesics, proxemics. He conceived "delicate self-correcting cultural ecologies", but was incapable of speaking or writing a plain word. In the margin of an article on cybernetics and invertebrates, his son finds scribbled: "Drink every evening ceremonial substitute for thing that hasn't happened - but what thing?"

If this seems to promise a difficult, trying read, let me reassure you at once. The book is a rapidly unfolding mystery that hints at suicide, murder and madness, and builds to a wrenching climax. Parks cleverly limits us to glimpses of Albert's bizarrely fecund mind through the irritation, incomprehension and admiration respectively of Helen, his cool widow, John, his suffering son, and Paul, his would-be biographer.

Helen and Albert were each other's lives. They had lived all over the world, in Africa, New Guinea; Helen working long days selflessly without pay in shabby clinics where the poorest came to die, Albert accompanying her everywhere, observing patterns, gestures, rituals. But in Delhi, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

John, on the threshold of adult life yet dependent on parents who treat him as an inconvenience, is a moving mixture of self-assertion and puppyish need. He loves and is proud of his famous father, but hurt by his apparent indifference. John is all confusion. Why, when prostate cancer can be held at bay for years, did his father die so suddenly? Does his girlfriend - or, for that matter, his mother - really love him? What is the meaning of the unfinished letter from his father, posted by a mysterious stranger, which speaks of dreams of rivers and seas? Why was his father studying spiders' webs when he died? Why did he always speak in riddles? John, assailed by Delhi-belly and attacks of a more sinister kind, must simultaneously cope with his loss and the incomprehensible culture of India.

The riddles are intended for us as well, and the search for answers compels us to confront the pathological nature of the modern world, in which leaders pay lip-service to religious fairytales while the truly sacred is trampled. Certainly this is true of the novel's portrayal of India. Parks demonstrates a canny knowledge of modern Indian politics: the darkness behind the superpower fantasy, corrupt politicians, violent police, hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides. He notes the media's obsession with celebrity and trivia, its disparagement of dissident intellectuals such as Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen.

Parks's impressions of India are authentic and unsentimental. Only in the realm of sex does he succumb to the temptation to be exotic; almost everyone in the book either has, or soon will have, slept with almost everyone else. However, the novel's real territory is the mind. As it moves to its denouement, the straightforward narrative starts to be jarred by odd shifts of tense from past to present and back again, often several times within a page. In a writer as fastidious as Parks, this cannot but be deliberate; he means to unsettle the reader and one soon comes to understand why.

The key is the growing turmoil in John's mind. When he asks about Albert's study of spiders' webs, his mother instead talks of his father's work on how artificial perfumes mimic and mask natural pheromone signals, causing unease and confusion. "The lady's smell invites but her behaviour rebuffs." There could hardly be a better metaphor for their own behaviour towards their son, or a clearer example of the conflict between message and behaviour that Albert's original, Gregory Bateson, called "double bind" and identified as a cause of schizophrenia in children. Ironically, neither Albert nor Helen recognises the emotional violence they have inflicted on their son, the outsider in their perfect marriage.

The clue at the beginning of the novel constantly nags at us. Readers who don't know Bateson should not look here for information about his life and work. Where then? Parks often refers to the web, in one place even giving Google results. A search quickly finds John Brockmann's centennial lecture on Bateson, who is quoted as saying, in the opaque style of his fictional counterpart: "Epistemology itself is becoming a recursive subject, a recursive study of recursiveness. So that anybody encountering the double bind hypothesis has the problem that epistemology was already changed by the double bind hypothesis, and the hypothesis itself therefore has to be approached with the modified way of thinking which the hypothesis had proposed."

This is exactly the position in which we, as readers, find ourselves. To get the most from this haunting and accomplished novel, we must go back to Bateson before returning to James; after that, it is hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins, but the book begins to shine with previously hidden patterns. The finale, when it comes, is unexpected and terrifying. Dreams of Rivers and Seas is a book that has already repaid a second reading; I am sorry not to see it on the Booker longlist.

If youre interested in buying this book, click here. You'll get taken directly to the appropriate Amazon page.