FICTION/Dreams of Rivers and Seas By Tim Parks Harvill Secker, 435pp. £16.99:'IT WAS AS if [ he] had something tremendously important to say and then wrote the whole book to make sure no one ever found out what it was." Flying into Delhi from London to attend the funeral of his enigmatic father, Albert, young John James has good cause to bear in mind his girlfriend Elaine's verdict on one of Albert's obscure though apparently brilliant anthropological works. For John is about to get lost in a psychological maze of his parents' making as he tries to understand their complex marriage and his place within it.
The always astute Tim Parks, whose work is usually set in England (where he is from) or Italy (where he has spent his writing life), has chosen, in Delhi, an appropriate terrain for John's disorientating quest. With its brutal bustle, its cultural intricacy, its claustrophobia relieved by moments of euphoric serenity, its oppressive weather threatening violence, the city reflects and intensifies his main character's volatility.
Arriving in the Indian capital for the first time, John, instead of finding his mother, Helen, waiting for him, has to wander the streets searching for the clinic where, even in her bereavement, she is doing voluntary work as a doctor. Later, seemingly unable to be alone with her son, Helen invites work colleagues to spend the evening with them.
The narrative soon switches to Helen's point of view, and we learn that John's presence, far from being a consolation, is somehow a threat. She "had been very much tempted, two or three days ago, not to tell her son about this at all . . . You can't deny a son the death of his father. John is a duty and a burden to me, she thought".
At the funeral which follows, students and academics pay tribute to Albert, who has spent his time in India studying - aptly - spiders' webs. And then, as everyone is leaving the graveyard, a writer named Paul Roberts arrives in a taxi, jumping out to greet the widow and announce his desire to write a biography of Albert James. Helen's alarm is palpable. Why? And will she agree to the book being written?
PARKS'S SET-UP IS flawless, establishing an ominous mood and beginning a compelling interrogation of the apparently close but mysterious marriage at the centre of his story. His two contrasting investigators, John and Paul, have different questions to ask about the complementary couple - the practical, socially engaged Helen and the provocative but resolutely unworldly Albert - who have travelled the world together in relative poverty, pursuing their separate aims. John, the son who was sent away to be educated at a boarding school in England, has always felt incidental to his parents' lives and now, at a crucial moment both in his work as a scientist and in his romance with the actress Elaine, is determined to get answers from his mother. Paul, the sensual journalist, wants to write a substantial work about Albert's ideas but instead finds himself distracted by the pleasures of India and his attraction to the admirable and still relatively youthful Helen.
The questions introduced early in the narrative resonate throughout, and as each is answered, new ones take their place.
Why was Albert always on the run? Each time in his career when his theories about human communication, his studies of gesture or ritual, have attracted attention or been applied in some way, he has withdrawn, taken up a contradictory viewpoint, moved on to a different country. What was his illness? How did he die? Why does he surround himself with young people, surrogate children, filming them and getting them to perform for him? And then there are the shadows in his past: the suicide of his brother, the court case in Chicago when Albert was accused of having sex with an under-age prostitute.
As for Helen, why does she ignore her son while opening up to her husband's biographer, a man she doesn't know?
As John's search for insight continues, he is swept into Delhi's frenzied and contradictory whirl, intoxicated by parties with beautiful rich young people, harassed by hawkers, afflicted by sickness, buffeted by monsoon storms as he sits in a disused rickshaw in a state of nervous collapse.
In an introductory note to the novel, Parks tells us that it was inspired to some extent by the theories and character of social scientist Gregory Bateson, who developed the Double Bind theory of schizophrenia, whereby sufferers are driven mad by receiving contradictory emotional messages from their families.
For John James, the mission is to avoid becoming the victim of his mercurial mother and his incomprehensible father, who "had always chosen to communicate in code. It was his charm and his downfall". And in the end it is the tortured son who gets close to the real story, while, in a parallel journey, the biographer is distracted from his objective but gets the attention from Helen that John craves.
WITH HIS CONSTANT switching of viewpoint, tense and emphasis, Parks, an extremely skilful storyteller, makes sure the novel's intensity never falters. He is dealing here with themes that have always interested him, from emigration and escape (Home Thoughts, Cleaver) to psychological breakdown ( Family Planning, Destiny). Writing about his early novel, Loving Roger, Parks observes on his website: "I'd hit upon what would be the major subject of the later books: the way an embattled relationship between people who love but cannot understand, can, ironically, confer an enormous sense of purpose and even destiny, if only because one is constantly seeking to overcome the obstacle of the other person's resistance". This fascinating study of a close marriage that has somehow become untenable is a richly atmospheric development of that theme.
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Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist