Fiction:David Park's sixth novel has a battle-hardened edge that may take his readers aback, writes Eileen Battersby
The Truth Commissioner By David Park Bloomsbury, 372pp. £14.99 A boy is being hunted. The chill smell of terror begins to rise. "He's never been anywhere he's never been" - until now. Suddenly, he finds himself clinging to the bark of a tree. It is an alien sensation: after all, this is a boy from the city, a boy who wants, who needs, "the dead touch of brick, of concrete, of the streets where he belongs". The opening sequence of David Park's relentless, exact sixth novel sets the scene for a solid, open-eyed narrative that spins on inevitability.
There is a darkly religious feel to this novel by one of Ireland's ablest and most understated writers which explores truth in all its ambivalence, in its hidden dread. The cover illustration alone prepares the way for what is to follow: the dove of peace looking more like a hawk, has a righteous menace about it - look quickly at the claws, and thoughts of Soviet Russia come to mind. Park has no intention of offering easy platitudes - not that he ever has, but this time it is different, this time a shrewd witness is telling us to listen more closely than ever before. That opening sequence has a dazzle, an almost lyric choreography about it. From then on, however, Park deliberately chooses the precise tone of reportage. The Truth Commissionercould be mistakenly described as a not overly polished thriller - but it is not a thriller, this is urgent polemic, Park is insisting that there is no such thing as an easy resolution and that far from being a comfort, truth is a thing that haunts and feeds one's fears.
ONE BY ONE he will introduce a series of characters, all linked to an act of violence and its repercussions. The Truth Commissioneris about the aftermath of war. Most of all, Park could be writing about South Africa, or Russia, 1980s Berlin, or Romania - it just happens to be about Northern Ireland. And Park, more perceptive than most, is well alert to the fact that we on this island would probably be more shocked if this book were about South Africa or Russia. He attacks the new complacencies - there is nothing complacent about The Truth Commissioner.
It shows how all the feel-good rhetoric trotted off tongues from all sides amounts to little if nothing; the reality lies in the memories and the sins and the guilt all festering, living in fear of the ultimate truths that may yet emerge. War can, and does, linger for generations as any historian will confirm. Since the publication in 1990 of his first book, Oranges From Spain, a collection of short stories marked by the influence of Bernard MacLaverty, Park has looked to the small personal tragedies. There has always been a tentative beauty about his work, a diffident grace.
This new book is tough; it has a "had to be written" quality about it and a blunt integrity. Although the tougher, almost forceful writing will initially unnerve admirers of The Healing(1992), The Rye Man(1994) and The Big Snow(2002), all of which possess that quiet grace of which Park is master, The Truth Commissionerquickly impresses as an important book - more important perhaps than artistically satisfying, yet convincing. These characters are real, there are no saints, and no monsters. His sinners have their reasons, but that does not make them right.
Throughout the narrative - and it is Park's longest book to date - each of the self-contained chapters amounts to an in-depth character study of the respective players. Park could be accused of a series of long short stories, all tenuously linked by an appalling fact - the disappearance of a boy, who is presumed dead - and then adding them together to make this long novel. Many novelists have done this; there is a lazy trickery about it. But not Park. He has no gimmicks, no tricks. The fact that it immediately becomes obvious which of the central characters probably did kill the boy is irrelevant because what really matters is that here is a collection of people all staggering through their days, aspiring to a normality that may amount to a future.
Nadine Gordimer, no great stylist, but a witness and one who kept watch on post-apartheid South Africa seems to have directed Park. This novel, written largely in the continuous present tense, has her briskness and reads like one of her books because it is shaped by the same watchfulness, that edgy concern. Park, a deeply serious craftsman, has, in Harry Stanfield, the truth commissioner, created a convincing portrait of a man ageing reluctantly, who has been brought back to Belfast, the scene of his failed marriage, to do a job. There he knows his estranged daughter lives and works. Stanfield's ego and vulnerability are well drawn. It is to him that a grieving mother and sister put their case: "All we want is Connor back so we can bury him." Their tragedy is the tragedy of the Troubles. There is nothing simplistic about it, although Park is aware of how simplistically and dismissively the rest of the world - namely the South - has come to view the overly familiar.
The Stanfield section is good, but with the introduction of Francis Gilroy the novel acquires an extra, edgier dimension. We are immediately informed of Gilroy: "He believes that there are only good habits and bad habits, and good habits don't die hard. In the old days it was bad habits that got you killed and the worst habit of all was to be in the right place at the right time, leaving yourself freeze-framed, the perfect picture begging to be shot." On Francis Gilroy, "the newly appointed Minister with responsibility for Children and Culture" hangs the narrative. A former terrorist, he is now one of the leaders in the Brave New World of post-Good Friday, ongoing Peace Process Northern Ireland.
Mainly concerned with the present, and co-operating with his wife in the preparation for their daughter's wedding, Gilroy has moments of doubt: "several times during the last few months he has been afflicted by the idea that Ireland doers not exist. Like God, it's just perhaps some concept that has no meaning apart from the one you construct in your head." Like Stanfield, Gilroy is another ageing man with health problems. Park has made effective use of illness as a metaphor for something far deeper.
FOR ALL THE symbolism - and a textual reading reveals an extraordinary depth of meaning - this earnest, deliberate book is as practical as it is political. Even so, Park does not lose sight of the mechanics of narrative, the characters are three-dimensional - Stanfield is particularly well drawn - and the dialogue is consistently strong. In drawing his unsettling view of the current situation, he is also placing it in the context of a wide human society; another character, Fenton, ex-RUC and a hard-working member of his church, drives across Europe to deliver supplies to a Romanian orphanage. Elsewhere in Florida, Madden, another major character, tries to forget but he is also forced to return.
Speaking in Dublin at a literary conference in 1990, the St Petersburg-born writer Andrei Bitov, referring to the collapse of communism, asked what would the writers of Eastern Europe write about now? The same would later be said of post-apartheid South Africa. Then JM Coetzee wrote Disgrace, while Gordimer has maintained her vigil. Complacency is the defining crime. David Park knows the chapter is not yet completed and that the truth remains dangerous.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times