Fiction: Tim Parks has never bothered to woo his reader with platitudes or charm and in Judge Savage, his 11th novel, he draws on the anger and tough candour that has always shaped his fiction, writes Eileen Battersby.
On all counts Daniel Savage appears to have beaten the system. An adopted son of middle-class English parents, he is not white and not sure of his origins. He does not even know what country his natural parents came from, his mother may have come from Brazil. He is not African black but he is not white either, that's the main thing, the almost-useful thing.
He is a white man inside a not-quite-white body with an almost cartoon appeal for willing females. His adoptive parents also have a natural son, an older boy, who made life, well at least childhood, hard for the young Savage.
But he's done well, almost too well. Having been appointed a judge for several reasons - not just on professional merit but also on political grounds - he has a very English wife, so English she regularly airs her contempt for all things English. They also have two children, not quite white, rather attractive, and the older one, a girl, is proving difficult.
This daughter is having her rebellion, a quasi-religious fanaticism kick crossed with sexual obscenity drive, part of which consists of deliberately failing her exams and of refusing to move into the expensive new house the judge's success has made it just about possible for the family to purchase. More statement than home, the new house, complete with complicated sale of the existing family flat, is more symbolic that most house moves - it is also a new beginning.
The judge, a serial adulterer who appears to believe he just happens to have fallen into so many relationships, has decided to stop sleeping around. He wants to hold on to the brittle, pathetic Hilary, the wife to whom he has never been faithful, but now, with age and position, thinks he needs. Meanwhile, she is approaching the business of re-establishing their sex life with a gusto that is as embarrassing as it is desperate.
Manchester-born Tim Parks has never bothered to woo his reader with platitudes or charm in a career that began as long ago as 1985 with Tongues of Flame. An outspoken, often brave, critic, he also works as a translator. Judge Savage, his 11th novel, draws on the anger and tough candour that has always shaped his fiction, most emphatically since two pivotal performances, the 1997 Booker short-listed Europa and Destiny (1999).
Those novels marked the maturity of a writer who began well and, with a few hiccups along the way, simply got better and better. As early as his second novel, Loving Roger (1986), he had entered the consciousness of Anna, an ordinary young girl, who, having caught the attention of the dangerously attractive office cad Roger, finds sufficient courage from her endless humiliations to eventually kill him.
She tells her story with a child's truthfulness and a woman's sense of outrage. By his fifth novel, Goodness (1991), Parks was exploring the mind and motivation of a man who can not deal with the reality of life with a handicapped child.
Always daring, with a feel for vicious humour and increasingly interesting for what he says rather than how he says it, Parks, who has lived in Italy for close on 20 years, is not an indulgent stylist, but is one of Britain's better, if more unsung, contemporary novelists. Here is an angry, often shocking and very real, utterly non-heroic portrait of a man whose life appears finally poised to catch up with him.
It is impossible to like Savage, but all too easy to believe in him and the almost comic series of disasters that line up to shake his narrow selfish life. As an evocation of the chaos of everyday life, this novel succeeds through its kaleidoscopic narrative technique. Observation, dialogue, introspective, time shifts, the writing is very clever and skilled while the prose never aspires towards frills or lyricism.
The good judge, a new-style anti-hero, is a study in convention, a born conservative, greedy and often fantastically stupid, who also likes to break the rules. Any woman is a potential bed-mate, be she his best friend's unpleasant wife or a member of the jury on a trial over which he is presiding.
Savage is not sympathetic, but then he is in the right company - the rest of the characters prove a nasty collection. The wronged wife Hilary, a piano teacher, snob and defiant martyr to her sham marriage, is a monster of distorted righteousness. A horrible character, now in her 40s, with a tame young male adult music student in tow, she resents and competes with Sarah, her beautiful and obviously completely messed-up daughter. Interestingly, son Tom, sustained by football, computer games and the final delivery of a pet dog, remains normal and one dimensional.
No one could accuse Parks of cossetting his characters. With every gesture, every muddled comment, he allows most of them to hang themselves. While the characterisation of Hilary might leave some readers asking could any person be quite as unappealing as this ridiculous woman, another, Christine, wife of Daniel's long time friend and fellow lawyer, Martin, is an appalling caricature of the predatory female.
Parading her disloyalty to all of the main players, it is she who makes no secret of having told Sarah about her father's sexual wanderings. When not actively spreading dangerous truths about Savage to his wife and daughter, she continually asks him for sex and he invariably obliges. "Now she stood hugging herself tight in the panelled hallway of a very expensive house with lawn to the riverbank and swimming pool, a little overweight perhaps, hair dyed obviously, yet younger and prettier than he usually thought her, that prettiness that comes from a constant feminine care for femininity."
Ever hovering on the sidelines, it is she who monitors the Savage marriage, while her own relationship with husband Martin collapses. He has mysteriously taken to his bed to concentrate fully on watching television soap operas. Martin Shields is an interesting creation. He simply slides out of life leaving Savage and the reader to figure out the reasons.
All the while, the Savages are trying to finalise the purchase of their new house and the sale of the flat to none other than friend Christine, Daniel is being bothered by a bedmate from his recent past. She is Minnie, a young Korean girl who needs his help, and possibly his protection. The judge's lack of judgment and his belief that he can break all rules leads him into dangerous territory. After being viciously beaten by the girl's family, he briefly becomes a national hero, then the scandals begin to drip into the newspapers.
While Savage the man is in turmoil, Savage the judge presides over the trial of a group of young people, one of whom having hurled a large rock from a motorway bridge, caused massive head injuries to a pregnant woman in a passing car. Initially on a life support machine, her baby is born but she dies. The cross examinations produce conflicting evidence.
With each new piece of evidence, a further personal disaster hits the deserving Savage who, nevertheless, retains his libido. It is a novel of revelations and side-steps and a multitude of sexual games; it is also a study of regret on many levels.
Somehow Parks sustains everything, the pace, the chaos, the inhumanity and the humanity until the final word. This is an intelligent, blunt novel of dangerous power and appalling truths, it leaves the reader shaking at the horror and surreal reality of it all. If Europa and Destiny demonstrated how good Parks can be, Judge Savage confirms how very good he is.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Judge Savage. By Tim Parks, Secker, 442pp, £16.99