Curiously, I really can't remember quite when Cara Massimina
was written, but I do know that it was before I had been published and before
I'd written Loving Roger. Let's say around 1982. I was pretty furious at the
time, leading a rather dull existence teaching English to the well-to-do of
Verona, under-achieving and underpaid. I wondered if, by writing a sort of comic
thriller, I might have more success than with the more determinedly serious
works I'd been sending off to London publishers. So enter Morris Duckworth, an
underpaid English teacher (surprise surprise) who in his attempt to penetrate
well-to-do Veronese society ends up pretty well destroying it. Basically he
tries to marry his way to wealth, exploiting the affections of the delightful
teenage Massimina who has unaccountably fallen in love with him. The family see
through it. Morris is cast out. But Massimina wants to run away with him, and
when she arrives at his flat she hasn't told anyone where she's going. Morris
has a flash of inspiration, and is doomed. He'll go off on a tour of Italy and
start writing ransom letters to her parents. Is it an elopement, is it a kidnap?
Certainly it turned out to be a dream of a plot. How it came to me I don't know,
but it cheered me up immensely. Anyhow, what came out in the end - I think this
was the only book I wrote straight onto a manual typewriter - was a love story -
for Morris manages to fall in love - a comedy of self justification, and a
chronicle of appalling crime. When Morris is trapped, he fights…
'Sharp and witty, expertly paced, frequently horrific and often very funny'
'Tim Parks presents the real, virginal, boastful, cracked Morris lurking
behind his own justifications as matters turn lethal and ugly. Clever, blandly
humorous and utterly immoral'
'An unusually classy thriller, true to life and not to be missed'
The New Yorker - 29 March , 1993
Morris Duckworth, the anti-hero of Tim Parks's sixth novel, is an arrogant,
impoverished English tutor marooned in Verona, unhappily sucking up to the dumb,
rich Italian students who pay his rent. Meanwhile, the life of ease and
erudition for which he feels destined is passing him by. Then Morris steals an
elegant Gucci briefcase on impulse and decides that he may be a criminal genius.
Before long, he has eloped with one of his wealthy students, a sweet Italian
girl, whose strict family fears that she has been kidnapped. Or has she
been kidnapped, and is she just too besotted with her attractive kidnapper to
notice? The unbalanced Morris, elated and terrified by his rapidly complicating
life, cannot seem to decide: he grows attached to his unsuspecting sweetheart
while sending gruesome ransom notes off to her relatives on the sly. Parks has
long been an expert on the marriage of convenience between sin and
rationalization and much of the humor and the suspense here come from wondering
how long Morris will be able to excuse his increasingly - alarmingly-
inexcusable behaviour. Yet, while this is a considerably more violent book than
the author's recent domestic novels, it also seems less serious - a surprisingly
lighthearted, if dark, entertainment.
A Novel of Menace By Tim Parks
Reviewed by Tim Appelo - the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, 11 April 1993
In 1979, a student at a Tacoma, Wash., junior high wrote the following Social
Studies report about a bright local collegian named Ted Bundy, then much in the
news: "He was our babysitter. He was not a very nice babysitter. He would play
games and scare us and then say they were just games." I was the Social Studies
teacher, and I have never read a more insightful critique of the psychotic
personality.
If you want to buy this book, click here Amazon UK or here
for Amazon USA.
my view of it
Before moving to the reviews, I should explain that, much to my dismay,
in the USA the book was called Juggling the Stars. An editor felt the
American public wouldn't understand the title Cara Massimina, as if one
had to understand titles, as if the Americans were less sophisticated than the
Brits...
and some
reviews...
Short takes
The Times Literary Supplement
The Sunday Times
The
Independent
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance
Psychopath Juggling the Stars
But Tim Parks's "Juggling the Stars" is a close second. Like
the child 'Bundy babysat, Parks grasps the essence of the killer's madness, the
obsession with domination games, the mimicry of normal human behavior and
emotions. Parks's protagonist, a Cambridge-educated British psycho named Morris
Duckworth, has more in common with Bundy: the loneliness of the long-distance
social climber, an inability to tolerate his own well-earned failure in life, a
cowardly, cagey, gradual approach to ultimate crime. Like Bundy, Morris grows
from petty thief to sociopath. clever in short-term improvisation yet prone to
breathtaking feats of self-defeating idiocy. And like Bundy, he only weeps for
himself.
Morris teeters on the brink of mayhem while tutoring coddled
upper-class twits in Italy. Sunk in self-pitying Raskolnikovian gloom, he
hatches a plot to elope with a rich, Gina-Lollobrigidesque teenager from Verona
- either that or to kidnap her. He is not quite sure which. Abhorring decisions,
he prefers to mull things over endlessly. Heitsing 17-year-old Massimina and
spiriting her crosscountry is, he muses in compulsive congratulation, "The
pertect synthesis of class warfare and womanizing." But Morris is no womanizer,
and as snobs go, he's in a class by himself. Emotionally pistol-whipped by his
virile philistine dad, clutched in bed to the abundant bosom of his smothering
esthete mum, Morris grew up to be your basic depraved virgin.
To overwhelm
his mighty misogynist defenses requires a virgin pure as driven snow, yet
willing to drift. Voluptuous Massimina is slow even by Morris's students'
standards; he can risk sending ransom notes to her folks and getting her face
plastered all over every paper in the country, because she doesn't read the
papers. He just has to keep her away from TV and improvise lies good enough to
gull her until they reach a certain chapel, where the cash is to be taped under
a particular pew.
Much as Morris loves Massimina's mind, what really wins
him is when she explains that she's slept with her mother ever since her papa
died when she was two - not kinkily, except in Morris's mind: "The thought of
the two females going to bed together, the one old and heavy and stale, the
other fresh, young and virgin, stirred a curious sensation in Morris that wasn't
quite excitement, or quite repulsion, but as it were an intensification of
interest pure and simple. He prided himself on his interest in life." Also on
being "a slave to no animal urges" - though curious fancies do flit across his
consciousness at odd moments. Moved by her allure, Morris thinks, "Perhaps it
would be fun one day to try out one another's clothes. ... "
Parks traps us
inside this psycho's skull, rendering his ghastly innards better than Thomas
Harris's "Silence of the Lambs" (though less well than his "Red Dragon;" and
infinitely less scarily than either)(some of this I agree with, and some of
it I don't!). These guys aren't evil geniuses, just connivers and their
mental clockworks are always slipping cogs. Morris's desperate efforts to keep
his plot ticking make for fascinating, horrifying, hilarious reading.
Parks'
light tone and touch are utterly remote from generic killer and psycho-bios.
Devotees craving close-ups of gore dripping viscously from ice picks onto
severed limbs will be disappointed. "Juggling the Stars" is above all a droll
book. When Morris extorts 400,000,000 lire from Massimina's parents, he
considers donating 40,000,000 to charity; "the fact was," he thinks to himself,
"he was a generous person, if only he had something to be generous with." Morris
is forever reflecting on aspects of his character apt to be noted by future
biographers. The book's wickedness at the expense of its own central character.
cunning in his machinations to leave no clues yet clueless about his own
motives, recalls Nabokov. The terrible mock honeymoon trek of Morris and
Massimina is a bit like Humbert and Lolita's - except that Massimina, too dim to
know she's in danger, is having the time of her life.
Morris's adventure is
macabre fun orchestrated with immaculate precision. We sweat through each
hairpin turn of events and each seems spontaneous and in retrospect inevitable.
Will Morris yield to his tender impulse to marry Massimina, pull off the scam
and live happily ever after as a plump plutocrat? How on earth will he continue
to keep straight his diverse lies? And is it really wise for that horny
vacationer they meet on the train to be ogling Massimina's tank top quite so
lasciviously?
"Juggling the Stars" is Parks's first try at suspense writing.
It's a killer.
purchases