my view of it...
One's deepest subject matter will always be the same. I've always suspected that. The same play as forces as one's personality. So it's always seemed important to be constantly changing the form in which that play takes place. By the time I started Home Thoughts, Tongues of Flame and Loving Roger had both been accepted for publication, hence the decision to change style, move away from the intense first person to a fragmented narrative coming across in a series of letters. I'd been in Italy some years at this point, yet it still wasn't quite home. I was still attached to a British ex-pat community here in Verona, a community where every member was constantly on the brink of going back. They had to decide every day whether they were staying or not. It was exhausting. People had come, of course, to escape a boyfriend, to find adventure, to avoid the straitjacket of a career, in short to put life off, and yet all were writing home, negotiating the terms of a possible return, while for some life was actually putting down roots here without their knowing it. So this is the novel about that community, fizzing with plots, some hilarious, some sad, shot through with the special pathos of letters pre-e.mail, pre-fax even: the intimacy, that is, of a loved one's handwriting, speaking directly to you, but a loved one who can lie about everything, because, of course, you are so far away. Ultimately, what you discover, is that home isn't at the end of a train or plane ride. It's in the past.
'Thoroughly enjoyable. I admired the dexterity with which Tim Parks moves from one voice to another in the creation of a gallery of entirely credible contemporary characters'
'Well and cleverly written, funny and sad'
'Very sharp…most impressive'
New York Times Book Review, 23 October, 1988
JADED GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
By Lore Dickstein (quite a name!)
Expatriate communities are among the oddest social groups in today's societies. Neither immigrants nor tourists, deracinated from the home culture, yet bringing odd, inappropriate bits of it with them, they never quite fit in their adopted country. They seem to belong nowhere. No country has had more experience with this phenomenon than England, and the "ex-pats" in the British writer Tim Parks's new novel, "Home Thoughts," are a vestigial remnant, a disembodied limb, of what was once a vast, dispersed population in the colonial empire.
Books Magazine, October, 1987
LATIN TEMPERAMENTS
By Hilary Mantel
Tim Parks's third novel is prefaced, of course, by the appropriate bit of Browning - 'Oh to be in England..' Next comes the apercu of an anonymous 'O' Level student: 'why didn't he go home then?' Good question.
Okay, if you want to buy this book, click here. You'll get taken directly to the appropriate Amazon page (that's Amazon UK, book out of print in the US at present).
...and the reviews
Short takes
Penelope Lively
Rosamund Pilcher
The Times
The English have long had a love affair with Italy, a country with a high tolerance for (or indifference toward) the "other". "Home Thoughts," Mr. Parks's third novel - his first, "Tongues of Flame, won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1986 - is set in fair Verona, where the author himself has lived for the last eight years.
"Home Thoughts" is a witty set piece on the lives of a motley group of British expatriates, many of whom teach English at the University of Verona. More or less as the center is one Julia Helen Delaforce, a single woman in her 30's who has fled a dead-end job and a long-term, pointless affair with a married man. Julia's colleagues and friends claim they are fleeing Thatcher's England and make bitter comments on English society, for example that England "is an Oxbridge conspiracy," or that the BBC (where a number of friends at home still work) is not "the voice of the establishment," but "the voice of inertia." In fact, these folks are in Italy for personal, idiosyncratic reasons. Boredom, aged and demanding parents, thwarted love affairs or career failures have driven them to seek a safe adventure in a new place. For this group, however, a profound sense of aimlessness, a fatalism verging on catatonia, has made "their exile a kind of limbo," a time-out from real life.
For such a short book - just over 200 pages - (sounds quite long enough to me)Mr. Parks presents an impressive number of characters in full dress. There are well over a dozen, set in a plot of such convoluted intricacy that it could fuel a soap opera for years. He is a highly visual, cinematic writer: events and people flash on and off the screen in quick, short, colourful takes.
Written in a crisp, economical style, "Home Thoughts" details a round robin of sexual relationships overlaid by a sticky network of friendships, hatreds and jealousies. Everyone is trying to land the one permanent post at the university. Julia, who arrives in Italy in high spirits - who "had imagined the hot Italian sun would turn her sluggish, blind, burrowing caterpillar into a dazzling butterfly" - is fired from her job, floats from one living arrangement to another, and gradually descends into a morass of depression. Sandro, a smarmy, good-looking operator, manages to sleep with almost all the women; he thinks his penis "functions as a kind of catalyst for helping others sort out their lives." He's not far wrong. Shot through the novel are improbable coincidences and disasters: fatal auto accidents, birth defects, an abortion, nervous breakdowns and an attempted suicide (it does sound rather a lot, doesn't it) .
Mr. Parks carries off all this frenzied activity by ingeniously structuring "Home Thoughts" as an almost (always an 'almost') seamless mix of narrative and letters. It is through the letters Julia and others send and receive that we hear a chorus of vivid, highly individualized voices. The range is nothing short of extraordinary. It includes the broken English of Sandro's Italian aunt, Julia's bored and whiny Mum's nagging, her artist brother Mike's flashy punk messages, her lesbian friend Flossy's (!) feminist rantings (heavily italicized) and the false, perky optimism of her former flatmate, Diana. Almost everyone in this novel, by virtue of writing letters, becomes a writer, and each comments on his or her own writing style and state of mind. Here Mr. Parks is not only exhibiting a forceful, authorial self-consciousness, but putting on an amusing sideshow for himself, not unlike those Italian Renaissance paintings in which the painter has put himself in the scene and is looking out boldly at the viewer.
"Tongues of Flame" and another previous novel "Loving Roger," both about the disastrous consequences of passion and obsession, show evidence of this kind of self-reflectiveness. While there are moments in this book when Tim Parks becomes a little too entranced with his own cleverness, "Home Thoughts" is a startlingly sharp and impressive piece of work.
There are lots of reasons for travelling, and one is flight from the self. Go a thousand miles, acquire a different set of problems, and even one's character flaws may be turned to account. Speaking a different language, one might be a different person. This is what Julia hopes. 'She was sick to death with the feeling, the consciousness, the every waking day moment of Julia Helen Delaforce.'
Julia goes to Italy to teach, and the book begins with three short letters she writes home. By the end of them, we know a great deal about Julia and her past, and we have had the huge satisfaction of reading someone else's correspondence. It is difficult to imagine how a book could begin better.
Tim Parks is witty about language school politics, and perceptive about the practical and emotional paralysis that expatriate life can induce. Julia has left a half-hearted lover at home, and their on/off love affair is the book's main theme. Interwoven with it are the stories of the other displaced persons she meets - like Alan, a would-be writer, who dreams of football matches while he waits for inspiration to strike, and the sneaky Sandro, who looks like Harrison Ford but thinks like Machiavelli. The use of letter has in effect allowed Tim Parks to write two novels, an Italian one and a London one; to keep a firm hand on his material, and to control the pace carefully. Between the orderly lines there are passions, betrayals, violent deaths - more surprises and revelations than one narrative could normally contain. No reader will feel short changed.
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