Strange how this book turned out the way it is - 'a one sitting read' as the Mail put it… It was time to change, after the two epistolary novels, above all, it was time to risk an adult male voice for the first time. I was about 33 at this point I was ready for it. I felt I could do the voice without it becoming me. At the same time, I was becoming aware, however vaguely, that my interest lay most of all in those problems that hover on the borderline between the technical - something you can solve -and the existential - things you can only learn to accept and grow with. The hero of the book, George, comes from a religious background he is determined to reject in favour of a technical world. He goes for a career in network programming. But life throws up two huge problems that just won't compute. His enigmatic wife, and then his terribly handicapped daughter. By turns the one problem masks the other, confuses the other. He doesn't understand. And then there's his libido too. It sounds schematic now, but at the time I only had George in mind this person, his pathos, and likewise the sadly handicapped daughter of a family I know well. I wrote 450 pages. It was rejected everywhere. Too long, too harrowing. Only when the American publishers actually sent me the proofs, almost two years after I'd written it, did I suddenly realise how the book should have been. In just three weeks working night and day I had it down to its present 200 pages. Unusually, I felt I knew exactly what I was doing. My favourite review was the Sunday Times, 'a brutal, but beautiful book.' When I saw that, I knew it was what I had been after. In the end the idea was all there on the first page, perhaps in the first sentence, written, I confess, with much amusement...

the first page...

My father was a missionary murdered in Burundi in 1956. It was very much his own fault. He had been warned to leave and by not doing so he risked getting the rest of us killed too. When we were captured in our white mission bungalow, my mother, my sister and I were given the choice of dying with him or of saying some simple formula that renounced our faith, after which we would be allowed to leave the country. I was too young of course either to have a faith or to renounce it, thought I don't doubt what my decision would have been. My mother on the other hand was torn. She's a superstitious woman and believes in the power of words spoken even when not meant, the kind of person who would feel guilty at discovering that the phrase she had innocently repeated in some foreign language was blasphemy. Even today she wonders if she won't be punished for all eternity for having responded to her maternal instinct and saved both herself and us.
It's curious thinking about this now. Presumably a shot rang out and dispatched my father. I don't remember, I was too small. I haven't the slightest memory either of him or of Africa. If I think of his martyrdom at all it is with total incomprehension. And I mention the grotesque affair now it is only because over the years I have come to see it as just the first, the most absurdly emblematic of a long series of incidents in which other people's pretensions to goodness were to clash, to my considerable detriment, with the most naked common sense.

...the reviews

Short takes

'The horror of it all is brilliantly handled as an ordinary man is faced with the most dreadful of moral dilemmas'
Today

'Parks pins down his characters with a quiet, but dreadfully accurate prose and then peels bare their duplicities, shames, fears and brutal impulses for our fascinated scrutiny'
The Daily Telegraph

'A one-sitting book that reverberates in the mind long after the final page'
The Daily Mail

The Independent on Sunday (1/9/91)

John Kemp

Thrusting software executive George Crawley hauls himself up by his bootstraps to escape from his Methodiest upbringing, but finds his faltering marriage further threatened by the birth of a handicapped child. Wholly unsentimental in its treatment of deformity, Parks's novel is far funnier than any plot summary could hope to suggest, as George moves heaven and earth in his attempt to resolve his difficulties. A taut fable about the conflicting claims of religion and common sense, Goodness negotiates the high-wire between tragedy and farce with unerring dexterity.

The challenge of Choice

Jonathan Yardley

The Washington Post, 20 November, 1991

Goodness is the fifth novel by the young British novelist Tim Parks to be published in this country. Like its predecessors it is economical, original, arresting and intelligent - in sum, richly deserving not merely of the usual critical applause, but also of a substantial readership. This latter, alas, it is unlikely to find (how right he was!) ; though Parks's American publisher has brought out his books with apparent care and pleasure, none has yet to make a nick, much less a dent, on the collective awareness o American readers.
This is more a pity than a mystery. Unlike his contemporaries and countrymen, William Boyd and Martin Amis, Parks has yet to assay a "big" novel of the sort that American readers prefer. Like Anita Brookner's (but then again, not like Anita Brookner's) , his novels weigh in at around 200 pages and seem at first glance to occupy narrow ground, though closer scrutiny proves very much to the contrary. But Brookner has managed to find American readers, so perhaps there is hope over here for parks as well.
As Goodness makes abundantly clear, there certainly ought to be. Whether it is the best of his novels is a mater for debate within the tiny circle of his admirers, but it seems so to me: The humor that was primarily latent in the previous books here comes quite vigorously to the surface, the characters are drawn with a rich understanding of human contradiction, and an immensely difficult moral question is handled both head-on and with full appreciation of its ambiguity.
The question is posed to George Crawley, a young man who has risen in a great hurry from a threadbare suburban upbringing to a handsome house in one of London's best neighbourhoods. He is a whiz at computer programming, "the soberly dressed junior director of a highly successful software company, personally responsible for a whole new concept of computer usage on small- to medium-size building sites." He is married to the girl he fell in love with at university, and into the bargain she is most agreeably wealthy.
But what should be a life of professional and domestic satisfaction is in fact deeply troubled. George and Shirley are quarrelling all the time; what had once been a happy marriage - "a triumph of contemporary civilization, busy young urban people, working hard, living well, faithful to each other, honest" - has gone bad, for reasons George does not wholly comprehend. Hoping to improve matters, he at last agrees to Shirley's plea that they have a child and in time a daughter is bon; they call her Hilary "because it means cheerful, apparently. Like us.
Poor George. Poor Shirley. Poor, poor Hilary. What the doctor says at delivery is: "It's a right mess this one I'm afraid. Never seen anything like it." Her feet point the wrong way and her thighs are disjointed; after four months her head still wobbles. At last they try radical surgery, but it is a risky proposition and it doesn't pay off. George and Shirley are stuck with a vegetable; Hilary is stuck with what passes for a life.
For George it is a terrible test. As a boy, growing up in an odd and unhappy family, he had made a vow: "I decided that after I had escaped my family and was in control of my life, I would never be gratuitously mean or violent, as Grandfather was, but then nor would I ever put up with anybody or any situation that made life unbearable, as Mother did. I would be honest and reasonable, generous where generosity was due, and I would always choose the road that led to a happy, healthy, normal life."
But now just such a situation has arisen. George finds to his horror that the choices are scarcely so clear as he had once imagined them to be. On the one hand he has a daughter whose life can be nothing save misery and whose very existence spells an end to any real happiness for him and Shirley; on the other hand she is his own child and, yes, he does love her, against all odds. What is he to do? Is Hilary's life worth saving? How, if at all, is he to get on with his life?
They are awful questions, and they force George to re-examine the notions of goodness by which he had so complacently tried to shape himself. The reader comes to realize, if George himself does not, that what he imagines as an act of charity toward Hilary is in truth one of great selfishness, yet it is Parks's considerable achievement to arouse empathy rather than contempt, and then to give George a moment of true goodness that is also redemption. How the issue is at last resolved is a bit of a surprise, but one that in the circumstances seems exactly, definitively right.
Like everything else in "Goodness", its final paragraphs ring true. Within less than 200 pages Tim Parks has created a remarkably large cast of singularly well-rounded characters, and has made the reader care about all of them; he has wrestled with a theme of immense dimensions and made sense of it (sense?) ; and he has told a story that is at once wrenching and wholly believable. All in all, an exceptional accomplishment and a lovely book.

purchases

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