THE act of witness has always been central to David Park's fiction. Hiss first novel, The Healing explored the traumatic effects on a young boy of seeing his father shot dead by Northern paramilitaries. The boy subsequently befriends an old man whose own response to the Troubles is a compulsion to record each sectarian casualty. For both, it is such witnessing that defines them.
In Stone Kingdoms, it is the powerlessness of the observer in the face of awful deeds which is confronted, and though it is set thousands of miles away from Belfast, it is the 1988 beating and shooting to death of two British soldiers who strayed into the path of a funeral which propels Naomi, Park's central character in this, his third novel, to quit the North for relief work in Africa.
The irony of choosing this particular incident is not lost on the reader. Most of us saw this deed being committed, thanks to television, and that fact alone our witnessing of it makes it more memorable than hundreds of other unseen murders committed in dark alleyways and on Border roads.
But Naomi, the daughter of a Donegal Protestant minister, sees something else during this televised act of barbarism which drives her to despair about her life in the North and to question her calling as a teacher.
So not only has Park swapped his familiar territory of the North for Africa (Somalia, perhaps, or Ethiopia the exact location is not made clear) but he has chosen to write Stone Kingdoms in the first person from the point of view of a woman.
This is always a risky business for a male writer, and I'm not sure that Park quite succeeds. Naomi is a troubling character, anyway, since she is so spectral that the matter of gender hardly matters, and yet, in her tentative relationship with Nadra, a native African teacher whom she becomes intimate with, Park sidesteps the issue of sexuality, which seems, under the circumstances, a little disingenuous.
Stone Kingdoms is a quiet book, almost mute itself, in a strange way. It moves with a stealthy authority, delving deeply into Naomi's composed interior life and her contained only childhood. Her emotional diffidence, coupled with a stubborn resistance, makes one wonder if Park doesn't see her as a symbol of a certain kind of southern Protestant mentality, so under siege that it barely exists.
Naomi is in Africa only a couple of weeks when she witnesses her first horror a starving mother whose baby she takes charge of but who dies shortly afterwards, and is buried without a name, or kin to mourn it.
She is berated for playing God by her superiors, and is taught the byzantine rules and regulations, most of them pretty arbitrary which govern the doting out of international aid.
All of this is very informative, but it has a vaguely documentary air about it, and it is only when Naomi witnesses the aftermath of a village massacre that Park's novel acquires some fictional energy.
Naomi and Nadra are forced to, flee, and it is their tortuous journey on foot cross country which redefines their relationship, from white versus black, First World versus Third World, teacher and student, oppressor and oppressed, and reduces it (or, more accurately, expands it) into a simple equation of one human being loving another.
Their journey ends in tragedy when Naomi is injured in an explosion which leaves her blind. It is not clear if her sightlessness is permanent, but either way it seems a rather bleak verdict that one is blinded if one sees too much.
And yet Stone Kingdoms is not a bleak novel. Park's conclusion, that it is love that can save us from our own barbarity and that love comes in all shapes and forms, applies just as certainly in the North as it does in Africa.
Park has always been a delicate and understated writer, and this book is no exception. He can evoke landscape like a poet and he captures perfectly the dream like stillness of introversion.
However, there were times when this reader longed for a little less muteness, patience and endurance and a little more fire.
