Destiny [Hardcover]

Tim Parks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2000

" Christopher Burton, the protagonist of Tim Parks's masterful new novel, is one of Britain's foremost foreign correspondents, the acknowledged world expert on Italian affairs. Three months after returning to London with his Italian wife for an extended stay, Burton, while standing at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel in London's Knightsbridge, receives a phone call informing him that his teenage son has committed suicide. Why, upon receiving this terrible news, does he immediately conclude that his marriage of almost thirty years is over? And why is grief so slow in coming? Burton feels his pious, mercurial wife may have given him his life in Italy, even his prestigious career, but she has also made his life impossible.

Was their troubled son somehow the victim of their long, explosive love-hate relationship? Looking back, Burton sees in his life a web of contradictions, unanswered questions, and confusions. And yet, this life has been his destiny.

Intensely dramatic, dark, and yet often hilariously funny, Destiny is a seamless, beautifully plotted story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity, at once romantic and callous, brilliant and blind. In Destiny, Parks offers us a searing account of what it means to tread the narrow line between sanity and psychosis."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The protagonist of Tim Parks's Destiny is a disillusioned, fiftysomething journalist intent on writing a book about Italy's national character. It's not merely intellectual curiosity that has led Christopher Burton to this project: as an expatriate Englishman, he's also desperate to figure out the inhabitants of his adopted country, and more specifically, his Italian wife. "You cannot marry a woman in one language and think in another," he muses, convinced that what he once found vehement and exciting about her has been revealed as shallow and distasteful. Mistaken for a German in Italy and an American in England, the narrator beautifully articulates the dilemma of living amid a confusion of tongues. "Language is national destiny," he concludes, which would seem to be bad news for his marriage.

Meanwhile, Burton and his wife are confronted with another, nonlinguistic catastrophe. During a three-month stay in England, the journalist learns that his only son has committed suicide in Italy. His first emotion is not grief but a kind of relief--after all, it was mainly Marco's schizophrenia that kept the couple together. As they travel back home, however, his flamboyant wife begins to unravel, and punishes him by lapsing into a "miserable and uncooperative mutism."

Destiny is an astute study of the inappropriate behavior that accompanies grief, as well as a blistering look at a marriage of equals--at love's endless loss and retrieval. The fractured, claustrophobic narration perfectly suits Burton's mood, as he lurches from ugly confusion to sublime lucidity, even (or especially) in the presence of his son's corpse. "Marco is less remarkable in death than in life," he notes, and then continues:

To my immense relief he was dressed. The corpse was dressed. My wife wasn't there. Dark trousers, blue sweater.... There were two or three heavy pieces of dark wooden furniture and a Sacred Heart on the near wall. A public space that apes the private, I thought, or the imagined private of a distant past. That saves you taking your late beloved home to lie under halogen light by the television.

It all adds up to an intelligent, enthralling performance. And Parks, who has previously taken on the question of Anglo-Italian manners in Italian Neighbors and Europa, accomplishes his most wicked exploration yet of identity and our truly, madly, deeply conflicted motivations. --Cherry Smyth

From Publishers Weekly

Reading this stunning tour de force from the prolific Parks (Europa, etc.) is like riding an out-of-control roller coaster through the dark caverns of a delusional brain. The news of his schizophrenic son Marco's suicide in a clinic near Turin sends ex-foreign correspondent Christopher Burton into a tailspin. As he and his Italian wife travel back to Italy from London, the teeming fragments of Burton's consciousness recoil from the reality of Marco's death, and he frantically ruminates about his 30-year marriage, fulminating against his wife for her theatricality and flirtatiousness, and for the rancor, fury and bitterness she has displayed toward him. Slowly, some facts emerge: Burton has behaved deceitfully toward his family; he has quit his job because he's possessed by the monomaniacal idea that he will write a "monumental" book, "an extraordinary achievement" that will prove that character is destiny and that national character is predetermined as well; and he and his wife used Marco as a pawn: "We drove him mad." Most of Burton's inchoate thoughts are highly inappropriate: he obsesses about an interview he plans to conduct, the day of Marco's funeral, with ex-prime minister Giulio Andriotti, who was indicted for criminal acts while in office. As Burton's stream of consciousness approaches disintegration, he finally admits truths about himself and his behavior in what becomes a deeply affecting portrait of a man in mental anguish. Parks's skill in constructing his headlong narrative plunges readers into Burton's mind; this is, after all, a more or less universal portrait of human relationships, fueled by tumultuous emotions, devious motivations, clashing egos and love-starved hearts. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; First Edition edition (April 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559705175
• ISBN-13: 978-1559705172
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,652,298 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tim Parks Goes Deeper, April 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Destiny (Hardcover)

This is my kind of novel. The disenchanted, urban, pan-European middle-aged protagonist is the only type of character that interests me at the moment. This book goes deeper into the kind of philosophical yet entertaining writing that Parks' readers have come to expect of him. The novel captures its protagonist at the riveting crisis point after a son's suicide, as he contemplates the breakup of his marriage.

If so wonderful, then why not five stars? Too much back and forth in the narrator's head, time sequence confusion, the way we can't figure out if we're in the present or the immediate past or both sumultaneously. There are always at least two thoughts being conveyed simultaneously, because the narrative strategy aims to mimic the jumbled thought processes during the hero's crisis. The author succeeds in getting this effect across, but it makes for a roller coaster effect. One has to read passages over and over to get at the gems of insight, of which there are many. But I'm afraid many readers will simply not be willing to battle the rocky terrain. Too much of the writer's effort, and the reader's attention, are expended on this wild ride, when I longed for information that would make the auxiliary characters more real to me. I still don't have enough of a sense of the dead Marco before his schizophrenia descended to feel a real sense of loss on behalf of the narrator. And throughout most of the book, the wife Burton is determined to leave seems more a larger than life symbol of Italian national character than a flesh and blood woman. She only acquires a name, for example, in the last chapter.

It also seems a bit of a lame anti-climactic afterthought when, late in the book, Burton reveals, "I can't forgive my wife for growing old." When remarks like these are thrown out, almost out of context, and a past mistress surfaces but is only sketchily dealt with, I sometimes suspect that Parks uses these male fiction conventions not because they are true to character, but because they are simply male fiction convetions, a way of saying, "Yes, I'm a regular guy, a twentieth century adulturous man." The mistress of almost five years' standing seems tacked on -- if he loved the girl as he says he did, why don't we feel it? Such tricks do not sit well with the philosophical sweep of the rest of the book, seem lazy when the reader knows what depths the narrative is capable of plumbing. Some auxiliary characters, such as the wife's former lover, Gregory, earn their space, but too many appear as plot-driven, conscious creations.

Yet, these are rather minor faults. Parks offers something unavailable in mainstream literary fiction today, rising above the typical clever-clever postmodernist wordplay of most "leading" British authors, or the ponderous political correctness of their American counterparts. How many books these days seriously explore ideas without sinking into preaching?

I applaud this book for questioning the current culture's over-emphasis on blaming and explaining through simplistic pop psychology formulas. As in Martin Amis' Night Train, we have the aftermath of a suicide without apparent motive, people struggling to find meaning behind an apparently meaningless act. But the phenomenon is rendered both so much more personally and universally: " ... we all invent stories to explain these horrible things to ourselves. We invent the past. When perhaps there is no explanation." The central concept of destiny, rather than psychology, determining the course of people's lives also figures in some of Anita Brookner's novels. I wish the often too chaotic style of Parks' novel could have borrowed just a little of Brookner's calmness, in order to let such concepts breathe.

The idea of going deeper into a marriage, into an experience, rather than starting over is explored in this novel. Likewise, in the writing itself, Parks goes deeper into his own style -- deeper into the workings of a human mind, deeper into faith, into philosophy, deeper into meaning, or the mystery of its lack: " ... And it occurs to me now that the brighter the light, the more evident it is that revelation is denied. The more clearly one sees, the more inescapable enigma becomes ... Whereas in a shady room ... It is just possible to imagine that mysteries will one day be revealed." Wonderful stuff.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not his best, but a great ending, October 17, 2000

By 

Stuart (Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Destiny (Hardcover)

I'm a big Tim Parks fan, and I've read most of his previous books and enjoyed them thoroughly. Unfortunately, I think Destiny was written more for the critics than the average reader. The book is pretentiously written, with numerous plots intertwined throughout each paragraph. I almost gave up half way through, but I'm really glad I stuck it out till the end - it has a great finish. Yes, it does define national character in a unique way. I'm glad to have read it, but didn't enjoy reading it.

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, April 25, 2000

By 

A reader (Carlsbad, NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Destiny (Hardcover)

I gave up halfway through Destiny, not because the writing isn't terrific-it is-and not because Parks has nothing to say-I find him to be a very astute commentator on a variety of issues (the trouble with marriage, national identity, etc.). But maybe that's the problem: Parks' is grappling with issues more than telling a story. Which is fine sometimes, but here it's heavy-handed and dull. Maybe I'm biased because I read Parks' last book, a book of essays called "Adultery and Other Diversions" which touches on the same issues with much more success. His narrative approach in non-fiction is superior to the tact he takes in Destiny (some of the essays in "Adultery" read like short stories). I might have forgiven all this if the book was funny. Which it isn't.