Category: David Park

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, David Park, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting, UK

‘Travelling in a Strange Land’ by David Park

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Travelling in a strange land

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury; 176 pages; 2018. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I was so gripped by David Park’s latest novel Travelling in a Strange Land that I read it in a day.

The book has a simple premise: a severe winter snowstorm a few days before Christmas has made all road journeys treacherous and flights have been grounded. Tom, who lives in Belfast, drives his car from Stranraer, on the west coast of Scotland, to Newcastle, on the east coast of England, to collect his university-aged son, Luke, who is ill and stranded in his student lodgings.

The narrative, written in eloquent, beautifully visual language, traces Tom’s physical journey. It details the ferry crossing, the monotonous drone of the satnav instructions (“Drive for six point four miles. […] At the next roundabout take the second exit“), the treacherous conditions on the roads, the constant phone calls back home to inform his wife and 10-year-old daughter of his progress, the additional phone calls to Luke to check his flu hasn’t worsened, the little stops and starts he makes on the road, and the people he meets along the way.

But that road journey is merely a metaphor for another journey Tom has recently had to make: that of a newly bereaved parent grappling with the death of his oldest son, Daniel, and the legacy of guilt and bewilderment and loss he now feels.

Deeply contemplative read

Travelling in a Strange Land — even the title is a metaphor for grief — is a deeply affecting read. It’s not sentimental in any way, shape or form. Instead it’s a wonderfully contemplative read, understated in its beauty, in its power to show the inner life of a man trying to make sense of the world and his place in it.

The narrative winds all over the place in tune with Tom’s thoughts. One minute we learn how he met and fell in love with his wife, who was engaged to another man at the time, during The Troubles; the next we are discovering how much he hates working as a wedding photographer because all today’s couples are shallow and obsessed with image over substance.

Music references are a constant refrain — “In the car I have the music I’ve chosen for the long hours ahead — Robert Wyatt, Van Morrison, REM, John Martyn, Nick Cave” — as are references to photography, including the types of pictures he wants to take of  “the moment that lies just below the surface of things, or a glimpse of the familiar from a different angle”.

And I have come to understand the truth of what Ansel Adams said: that you don’t make a photograph just with a camera but that you bring to the act all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard and the people you have loved.

The plot, which is paper-thin and barely there, is compensated by the exemplary characterisation — even those people who are “off-page” such as his wife, his daughter, and even Luke are brought to vividly to life by Tom’s memories of conversations, incidents and day-to-day interactions. His late son, Daniel, of whom we really know nothing about, flits in and out of the storyline, as enigmatic in death as he was in life.

But everything is held together in an expertly crafted portrait of a father’s grief and of a man realising that the picture we present to the world is never quite what it seems.

Things to click:

Listen to the Spotify playlist of all the music mentioned in the book.

Look at Sonya Whitefield’s photographs inspired by the book.

Read my review of David Park’s The Light of Amsterdam (2012)

Read my review of David Park’s The Truth Commissioner (2009)

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, David Park, Fiction, Holland/Netherlands, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting

‘The Light of Amsterdam’ by David Park

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Light-of-amsterdam_final

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury; 384 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

They say travel broadens the mind. It can also shake us out of complacency or give us the opportunity to see things in a new light. This is what happens to three people from Belfast who travel to Amsterdam for a long weekend one December.

Three diverse characters

Alan, a university art teacher, is still coming to terms with an adulterous “fling” that resulted in the end of his marriage. Karen, a worker at a care home, is struggling to save enough money for her daughter’s upcoming wedding. And Marion, who runs a garden centre with her husband Alan, is feeling old and unloved.

All three, who do not know each other, are middle-aged. But they have other things in common, too. Each one nurses a private hurt, lacks self-esteem and is beginning to think that life has passed them by. Their individual trips to Amsterdam — all taken on the same weekend and on board the same flight — show them it is possible to change things for the better.

It also shows them that their loved ones are not the people they imagined them to be.

Multiple narratives

As with David Park’s previous novel, The Truth Commissioner, the book is comprised of multiple narratives. But this time around, instead of isolating each narrative thread in a self-enclosed section, Park intertwines them in alternate chapters. This choppiness helps keep the momentum going and reveals the unusual and often unpredictable ways in which these characters bump against each other, both in Belfast and in Amsterdam. And it also helps highlight the similarities between them, such as their poor personal morale and the need to find new meaning in their life and relationships.

As each character’s story unfurls, we get to see their flaws and weaknesses — as well as their understated strengths. There are “lightbulb moments” for each character as they suddenly see things in a new light — the light of Amsterdam of the title — and realise there is a way forward out of their current rut.

Alan, who is trying to relive his youth by attending a Bob Dylan concert, finds a new way to reconnect with his monosyllabic teenage son, who has reluctantly joined him on the trip. Karen, who is on her daughter’s crazy hen party, realises she no longer has to be taken for granted by the self-absorbed young woman she has struggled to raise alone. (I loved this bit, and I think a cheer may have emitted from my lips when the pair of them have the world’s biggest row.) And Marion, in Amsterdam for her birthday, discovers that she has misunderstood her husband’s needs for far too long.

A compassionate novel

The Light of Amsterdam is a gentle, worldly-wise novel about human relationships. It explores the gap between generations — and within marriage — and shows how our desire to be loved and respected is a common trait among all people, regardless of age or background. But it’s also a lovely and evocative portrait of Amsterdam, its tree-lined canals and quiet cobbled courtyards.

The Light of Amsterdam is David Park’s eighth novel. It has just been named on Fiction Uncovered’s list of British fiction for 2012, so expect to hear more about this book and its Belfast-born author in the weeks and months ahead.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, David Park, Fiction, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting

‘The Truth Commissioner’ by David Park

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TruthCommissioner

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 372 pages; 2009.

All good things come to those that wait, which is a fairly apt description for how I felt as I read David Park’s The Truth Commissioner. I considered abandoning the book several times, before everything began to kick into gear somewhere around page 242. That’s a lot of pages to wade through, and a lot of information to hold in your head, before things begin to make sense. It’s worth the effort though.

The story revolves around a Truth and Reconciliation Commission designed to heal the scars of Northern Ireland’s past by finding out what happened to citizens who disappeared during the Troubles. It hones in on one particular case in which a 14-year-old boy, Connor Walshe, disappeared, believed killed by the IRA on the basis that he was a “tout”.

The Commission is headed up by Harry Stanfield, a human rights lawyer, especially appointed by the British Prime Minister as the Truth Commissioner because “he has no personal or political baggage to be packed on either side”. But Stanfield, who spent the first 12 years of his life in Belfast, feels no affinity for the place and thinks the process of the Commission is a bit like “an old manged, flea-infested dog returning to inspect its own sick”.

Later we are introduced to three other characters: Francis Gilroy, a former political prisoner who is the newly appointed Minister with responsibility for Children and Culture; James Fenton, a retired RUC detective who now spends his time climbing mountains and helping a Romanian orphanage; and Danny, a young man living in Florida who’s looking forward to the birth of his first child with his Latino girlfriend, Ramona.

The current lives of these four men are explored in rather sizable “pen portraits”, which read almost as if they are standalone stories. This is an interesting approach to take, because it gives the reader a real sense of these people as human beings, rather than as the stereotypical characters one might expect from a book that is about the Troubles (for instance, the Brit, the cop, the IRA leader and the young terrorist). But it also makes for a slightly frustrating read, because you have no knowledge of how these characters are connected, nor how they fit into the nugget of the story, until some 150 pages from the end.

The novel doesn’t hit its stride until the four divergent storylines merge into one. But once the pace picks up it becomes almost thriller-like as you wait for the “truth” to come out: what did happen to Connor and who is to blame?

This is not a book for impatient readers, but it is a rewarding one. Given it’s set in Belfast and explores the notion of relatives reclaiming their dead in a war that raged for 30 years, I had expected the book to focus on politics and religion. But these are mentioned in mere passing, and often with the sense that it was all rather pointless, as these observations by Stanfield attest:

He looks at the faces of those standing outside the drawing office. The wind has whipped their cheeks so that they look as if they bear thin tribal incisions cut in their flesh. And after all, what was it really, except some rather pathetic and primitive tribal war where only the replacement of traditional weapons by Semtex and the rest succeeded in bringing it to temporary attention on a bigger stage?

The Truth Commissioner is essentially a book about people, with foibles and troubled histories, who are trying to find their way in unfamiliar, peaceful terrain. You get the sense that none of the four main characters are bad people, but that they got caught up in events that were “normal” at the time but now, through the lense of peace, look barbaric and wrong. Each of them, grappling with secrets of their own — whether it be Stanfield’s penchant for sleeping with prostitutes or Gilroy’s belief that he’s not cultured enough to be the minister for culture — are plagued by guilt, fear of retribution and denial. Each of them wants a way out. The “truth” isn’t always the answer…