David Park's seventh novel, 'The Light of Amsterdam', looks destined to become an international bestseller. It is an astute observation of humanity, with echoes of Brian Moore and Richard Ford, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY
IT IS EXCITING and so very satisfying to see a writer I have been reading since his first collection of stories, Oranges from Spain, from 1990, progress through six novels, ranging from very good to excellent and, now, beyond.
With The Truth Commissioner (2008), the Belfast writer David Park produced a thriller that was important and politically timely. It was also a powerful, post-Belfast Agreement polemic – a description that did not please Park but was true.
His new novel, his seventh, The Light of Amsterdam, looks destined to become an international literary bestseller with immense human appeal. Echoes of the great Brian Moore are evident, as is a sensibility similar to that of the US master Richard Ford, but Park is more than merely a fine writer with a great deal to say – as if that were not sufficient. He is an astute storyteller whose vision is sustained by instinct, intelligent observation and a sense of responsibility. There is also a determination to perfect his art. He was never going to settle for being very good; he wanted much more and has certainly achieved it.
The unexpected sunshine has cast a spell on the majestic National Botanic Gardens, in Dublin. Most of the visitors seem to be experiencing heightened well-being. Strangers are smiling at one another. The cameras are out and the car park is full, with a queue for access.
Short and unobtrusive, David Park patiently stands, holding a black canvas satchel and peering into the brightness. His expression is thoughtful and interested, with the air of a doctor about to deliver bad news. Now 59, he is quiet and intense, slightly anxious. Initially formal, he is courteous, always sympathetic and concerned. Then, only a few minutes into the conversation, he announces, “The suspense is killing me,” and asks the question to which most writers, particularly successful ones, affect indifference: “Do you like the book?” It is typical of Park: honest and direct, with no celebrity complacency. He is genuinely committed to writing as well as he can.
On hearing that it is very different from his other books, in that it is less political and more humorous, Park smiles and says: “That’s good to hear. My wife told me to lighten up.” The Light of Amsterdam is no comedy, but it is very wry, brilliantly undercut by Park’s subtle Belfast humour and so real it hurts.
In person he is funny, very quick, with the dry one-liners that must have silenced many an aspiring smart-alec pupil. Having spent his working life as a teacher, he misses very little. He clearly studies humanity in its many shapes and sizes, and understands social nuance.
He was born into a working-class Protestant family honed by strict fundamentalist attitudes. His father was a factory worker and his mother cleaned the local school. Yet Park went on to study English at Queen’s University. He is well aware of life’s many ironies. Education led him into a different world, but it didn’t erase his memory.
This novel was almost completed when he finally became a full-time writer. Until he retired as the head of English at a secondary school, he was always a teacher who wrote, busy with administration as well as preparing classes. He found the time, although he was often exhausted at the end of a day and wrote in snatches. The names of characters might accidentally change during the long lulls. But Park is meticulous and careful.
The Truth Commissioner, which was serialised on BBC Radio 4, could be viewed in many ways as a Northern Ireland version of the postapartheid fiction that South African writers produced in response to their changing country. Park, whose fiction also includes The Healing (1992), The Rye Man (1994) – still one of the most seriously under-rated Irish novels – and The Big Snow (2002), always addressed the situation in the North. “I saw it as a moral responsibility, an obligation.”
On the subject of the North, Ulster, Northern Ireland, his opinion has not changed. “It is where I am from.” Yet, whereas his narratives have tended to address the public, this book is rooted in the private, the personal preoccupations of a small group of compellingly well-drawn characters. “It struck me that it is a bit like a Dutch interior; I have tried to get to the inner life of each of them.” These are real people. Two characters in particular dominate: Alan, a teacher, and Karen, a single mother bracing herself for her daughter’s wedding.
Alan is a middle-aged art-college teacher. Newly divorced, he is suspended in a limbo between being married and suddenly not. His life is a mess. He made one stupid mistake in a fleeting sexual encounter and then compounded it by telling his wife. Their son Jack has retreated into a sullen world of his own.
The narrative opens with George Best’s funeral, an emotive occasion Park likens to the death of Princess Diana. Alan’s simmering cynicism is soon countered by genuine feeling. He, too, has his memories of the great Best: “Unlike most of those around him he could claim to have actually seen him play and not just the jaded pastiche of his final years when his legs had gone. Saw him at Windsor Park for the price of a bus fare by simply going to the turnstiles, searching for a sympathetic face and asking to be ‘lifted over’.” That bit is from real life: “That was me, I was lifted over the turnstiles, and I had Best’s autograph as well and” – as does Alan in the novel – “I lost it.”
The novel is not autobiographical, and Park is not an autobiographical writer, but when asked if he was tempted to write Alan, a compelling Everyman, in the first person, he replies: “No, I like to keep the distance. I always distance myself.”
Many aspects of the book reveal a fifth gear. Elements of his writing that were, until now, very good have become even better, particularly the movement between the characters and their various viewpoints. There is a subtle choreography and a structural cohesion that is tested and succeeds as the three major sets of characters move through the deftly detailed action. Alan is upset by the unplanned upheaval of the life he knew. It is not easy watching his wife now involved with a younger, utterly unsuitable man, but the sharpest hurt Alan experiences is his son’s rejection.
The boy’s new indifference is devastating. “The past was simple. But one day you were searching in rock pools or kicking football in the garden and the next it was all gone, airbrushed from history and replaced by a monosyllabic, non-committal, non-communicative vagueness that suggested a gaping space had opened up inside, that the hard drive had been rewired, reprogrammed and you didn’t have the password to access it anymore.”
The inevitable parental rite of passage from god to idiot is one of Park’s several themes. He smiles his kindly smile, the one that makes him look years younger, and says: “Well, that’s what happens; it’s very grim.” Alan’s trip to Amsterdam to see his hero Bob Dylan in concert is threatened by having to babysit the 16-year-old Jack while his mother and her new swain travel to Spain to check out a business venture.
Karen is a single mother who, having been abandoned while pregnant, divides her days between two cleaning jobs. She is, reluctantly, on her way to the same city as part of her daughter’s hen party.
Shannon, the daughter, is vain, selfish, insensitive, desperately ungrateful and real. Park smiles gleefully: “She’s an awful bitch.” The dynamic between mother and daughter is also exact. Park’s parent/child sequences approach those of Richard Ford in Independence Day (1995) when the narrator, Frank Bascombe, sets off to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, surly son in tow. Park admired Ford, and Ford would surely be impressed by Alan and Jack bickering over the death of Kurt Cobain.
The trauma of parenting, as well as the respective agonies of ageing and betrayal, the sting of remorse, shape the narrative, and Belfast maintains its influence, even when the characters, including Richard and Marion, a relatively comfortable middle-aged couple, set off for their weekend in Amsterdam. The Dutch capital represents different things for them all. It is a city Park knows well; it was the first foreign place he ever went. The Dylan concert sequence is remarkable, not only for what it reveals about hearing a hero in late career.
Parks recalls the home he grew up in, the middle one of three sons and, in common with Alan, the day a mono record player first arrived. “We had a record player but no records. The first LP we bought was Dylan’s Greatest Hits.”
It is fascinating to see that the same sense of justice that drove Park’s earlier fiction, written as he watched history unfolding around him, determines his attitude to Karen, a woman ill treated by life. He acknowledges that everyone’s particular problem is the biggest thing in their little universe. Karen’s real hurts may dwarf the apparently lesser grief of Marion, whose weekend with her husband is dominated by her fears that he may have been unfaithful to her, but Park makes it clears that Marion’s doubts about her weight, her age, her lack of beauty, the challenge of young women, are equally valid.
“I’ve already begun working on something – the wives of three poets, two real, one imagined.”
The Light of Amsterdam is published by Bloomsbury
