A geologist takes his young mistress to a Mediterranean island, has a personal crisis and gets involved in a hellishly complicated building scandal, involving a couple of deaths and the nightmare scenario of slabs of granite tumbling from Australian skyscrapers… So far I'd written the novels using an alluring but distorted perspective or by giving a whole series of complementary and conflicting perspectives. Now I was looking for something different. I wanted to find away of being intense without resorting to the first person, and above all a way of making the books intellectually richer without stooping to the tedious business of taking time out from the story to reflect on things. It was, it still is, quite a conundrum and often you start without knowing how it will work. This time I drew on two very different sources, my years of grind translating magazines about stone quarries, for that was how I supported myself when no one wanted my writing, and then my more recent translation of Roberto Calasso's book on the Greek myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Peter, the geologist hero, agonising over marriage and mistress, sees everything in geological metaphor as a way of taking the sting out of it. The strategy has the unhappy result of making the geological world, which is his work, reverberate with personal anxiety, an anxiety that meshes with the archetypes suggested by ruins, statues, vases. Eventually, Peter escapes from private decisions by using his technical expertise to sort out mystery, scandal, and perhaps even murder. The whole thing was intended to be soaked in a a sort of lyrical, even erotic engagement with the geological world - weird. Let's see what the reviews said.

...and the reviews

Short takes

'Masterfully controlled…this is the best new novel I have read all year…a must for any holiday suitcase'
The Spectator

'Tightly plotted and with the dynamism of a superior thriller'

The Independent

'Powerfully haunting'
Time Out

Following Fault Lines

Nicholas Wroe, Times Literary Supplement, 10 September 1993

Tim Parks is a versatile writer In addition to translations of Calvino, Moravia and Calasso, he writes for the trade journal of the association of Italian Stone Machine Manufacturers. In Shear, his sixth novel, the strands of his literary career come together in a powerful and impressive work.
Peter Nicholson is a geologist, sent by his London office to investigate a quarry on a Mediterranean island for his Australian clients. There is a dispute with the quarry owners, and Nicholson has been briefed to find fault with the site and to write a damning report. He is accompanied on the trip by his young mistress, Margaret, with whom he intends to spend most of the four days, either on the beach or in bed. This plan is soon disrupted, first by the appearance of the widow of an Australian worker killed at the quarry, and then by a fax from his wife informing him that she is pregnant.
Hazel Own, clearly unhinged by grief, is looking for the reason for her husband's death. With her young daughter in tow, she haunts the quarry and Nicholson's hotel, asking questions and threatening revenge. Peter's wife makes it clear that unless he responds quickly and enthusiastically to her news, she will have an abortion. When Nicholson explains the mechanics of a rock fall, he speaks of more than just geology.
'Imagine a man released from the pressure cooker of home for a week. His heart expands, doesn't it, his mind opens. Like a sponge when you let go. Well, it's the same with the rock when you pull it from under the hill and slice it up. Stress relief. And as it expands, it fractures, in a cobweb of tiny cracks. Resistance to shear is reduced, it becomes more fragile.
Shear then occurs when 'pressure is applied in at least two different and not diametrically opposite directions.'
As Peter, reluctantly, becomes more involved in the dubious activities of the quarry and Hazel's plight, so his personal tribulations increase in intensity. By the time London instructs him to drop the case, forget his report and come home, it is too late for him to walk away from his tasks. He has already begun the exhausting work of digging deeply into the self and into the mysterious events he has stumbled on.
Parks handles his material with certainty. The intricate geological imagery, although studded by an uninhibited use of industrial and scientific language, is never seen to be crudely bolted to the narrative. The subtle links between client and contractor are illustrated in a range of relationships. The classical allusions are poignant and evocative. This technical mastery allows Parks to present with absolute clarity the complex motivations that drive Peter Nicholson on.
As the moral and emotional pressures intensify, so the imperfections of the rock are mirrored in the characters and the situation. Nicholson is pulled by demands from himself, his wife, the clients, his mistress and his boss. At stake is the marriage, the life of an unborn child, his career, his relationship with Margaret and potentially the lives of many, if the stone he approves for building is not safe. It is inevitable that all decisions and choices will emerge as suspect. Even integrity can be 'just a cover for escape'.
The dust-jacket quotes a description of Tim Parks as, 'the best British author today". On the evidence here, there should be no reason to be so parochial in praising him in future.

Brilliance forged under stress

Kate Kellaway, The Observer, 22 August, 1993

Peter Nicholson is a geologist who translates the world into rock. He describes his lover's skin as 'white to pink, perhaps potassium-aluminium silicate, but with a pearly lustre'. He can identify the rock a plastic table is trying to imitate; he dismisses his marriage as 'erosion of an old uplift'. Nicholson's obsession with rock reflects his cold, faulty purchase on the universe.
Tim Parks's obsession with rock - he was a translator for the Italian quarrying industry - is more complicated. He makes his geological metaphors work hard for their keep. In his graceful, audacious preface, he even likens the composition of his novel to the gradual formation of a rock. Observing that no two rocks are ever the same, he describes his book, a thriller, as a 'meditation on uniqueness'. The particularity of Parks's writing (this is his sixth novel and best yet) salutes his theme. Shear is fanatical, chilling, but brilliant.
Parks constantly plays off distinctive details against nondescript universality - Nicholson is dogged by the fear that nothing is unique, but he is beginning to learn that one love is not the same as another.
He's easily distracted from his work. He's supposed to be investigating a granite quarry on a Mediterranean island on behalf of an Australian client. A man has died in suspicious circumstances. For Nicholson, at first, his death is little more than an inconvenience. But he observes two things about the dead man, details that fall in with his anxious preoccupation, 'a banal uniqueness' and an undermining similarity to himself - a chipped tooth (He notices teeth with particular zeal, as you would expect).
While Nicholson fails to investigate the man's death adequately, Parks conducts an investigation of his own into the nature of duty and of countervailing irresponsibility. Parks has a gift for overseeing his material - with aerial mastery. He's the man who sits in the crane monitoring work in the quarry.
He explores the nightmare of a man compulsively escaping. Nicholson escapes his marriage, for a much younger woman - who comes with him to the island. He loves her but finds himself, almost involuntarily escaping again, going to bed with a beautiful interpreter (with suspiciously perfect teeth). Escaping from escape is a trap: the harder he runs, the more the drawstrings around his life tighten. Parks makes us see what a slippery thing a sense of duty is, especially in the context of wholesale infidelity. Duty becomes an alternative form of escape; a return ticket to an old life.
We are told, 'when pressure is applied in at least two different and not diametrically opposite directions' the result is 'shear'. It's a pleasingly exact description of what most of us would describe as stress. Parks offers a devastating picture of the effects of extreme pressure.
Nicholson's mind resembles the sound-proof cabin at the quarry - he only lets into his consciousness chosen interference from outside, ignoring frantic faxes he receives from his wife. The book seems (and Parks's introduction obliquely confirms this) to have been written out of pain; it has a cauterised articulacy. Definitely a novel for the Booker shortlist - which is just another way of saying: read it.

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