Fiction: A group of English canoeists from a sports club arrive at a holiday camp in the Italian Alps, intent on adventure and a chance to increase their respective white-water skills. Their leader is Keith, well-meaning and as irritating a character as only Tim Parks can draw, writes Eileen Battersby.
Beneath the good humoured, "let's have a great time together for ourselves and each other" and "community experience" rhetoric is the fact that shooting the rapids is highly dangerous and several of the party are unlikely candidates for such a challenge.
Running the canoeing course is Clive, a large, brooding almost middle-aged oddball determined to save the world, and his much younger, adoring Italian girlfriend who just wants to please him. Michela, is beautiful and aside from basing her every thought and opinion on Clive's views, wishes she were English.
Parks is always sharp and merciless in his depiction of people. The opening pages of Rapids, his 12th novel, resound with the competitive overly sexualised vulgarity of people on vacation. It is a mixed bunch of enthusiasts, a couple of middle-aged minders in charge of teenage boys and girls, as well as, most interestingly, a couple of fathers and their teenage children.
The theme of foreigners on the rampage abroad is something Parks, himself long settled in Italy, does very well. One of his earlier novels, Europa, which was deservedly shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize, explored the fragile psyche of language teachers based abroad. It was vicious and funny and consolidated the reputation of a good writer who has been consistently good since the publication of his first novel, Tongues of Flame, in 1985. Since then, despite his tough candour and assured, unfussy style, he has perhaps payed the price of exile and has retained a middle-range literary status in Britain. Yet Europa, with its scathing narrative voice, was a breakthrough, which he followed quite brilliantly with two excellent, if underrated novels, Destiny (1999) and Judge Savage (2003).
Rapids would be worth reading for the exciting and convincing descriptions of how to survive in glacier-fed waters. There is a good deal of technical detail and anyone who has done a bit of kayaking will be drawn in. Yet the observations and tensions emerging between individuals quickly take over. At first glimpse, Clive and his lover appear to have smugly created their own paradise based on tourists keen to share their sport. But all is not well. Clive abruptly rejects Michela and she loses her sense of self.
Other problems develop. Much of the narrative focus rests on Vince, the last to arrive at the camp. He is the middle-aged, senior London banker father of a teenage girl.
The pair are in the shadow of Vince's dead wife, a sports enthusiast who was due to bring their daughter on the holiday, but died suddenly. Well-meaning and aware of his age, and of being out of his depth with his daughter as well as with the sport challenges, Vince speculates about Clive and Michela.
As anticipated, a story such as this places characters in conflict. Parks achieves this through harsh though authentic dialogue. There is the expected accident, albeit more psychological then physical. Michela's egotistical vulnerability acquires a nastier dimension, although it is she who shrewdly observes, "so many of the people who do dangerous things on rivers and mountains are afraid . . . Afraid of dying, afraid of settling down. Afraid of life beginning really, and afraid it will never begin. These sports are something you do instead of life".
The romance and revolution are irrelevant. Vince remains the sympathetic centre of a book that is ultimately a curiously philosophical tract concerning how to survive the messy business of being alive.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Rapids. By Tim Parks, Secker, 246pp. £12.99
Fiction