Destiny [Hardcover]

This complex and intriguing novel opens with an Englishman learning that his only son has committed suicide in Italy. His first emotion is not grief, but rather relief as he realises that he will at last be able to leave his wife to whom he has been bonded by their son's schizophrenia. As they travel back to Italy the narrator describes how his flamboyant wife, who both appals and delights him, lapses into "miserable and uncooperative mutism" as punishment.

Tim Park's protagonist is a fifty-something, disillusioned political journalist who is trying to write a book on Italian national character in order to predict the behaviour of the inhabitants of his adopted country, especially his wife's. "You cannot marry a woman in one language and think in another", he muses, convinced that what he once found vehement and exciting about her, and indeed Italy, has been revealed as shallow and distasteful. If he can discover how national character determines choice, then he will be able to act differently and leave. Mistaken for German in Italy and American in England, the Englishman articulates beautifully the dilemma of living in another tongue, seeing it as a "faulty contact" which inhibits true understanding. "The language is national destiny", he decides and so he and his wife are destined to confound one another.

Destiny is a highly astute study of the inappropriate behaviour that accompanies grief as well as a blistering account of a marriage of peers, of the failings of commitment and monogamy and of the endless loss and retrieval of love. The fractured, claustrophobic narration perfectly suits the narrator's ugly confusion and sublime lucidity as he evades then shoulders responsibility for his mistakes. An intelligent, enthralling novel about the meaning of identity and our maddeningly conflicted motivations. -- Cherry Smyth

The fantastic new novel from the author of the Booker Prize shortlisted Europa.

Soem three months after returning to England, and having at last completed that collection of material that, once assembled in a book, must serve to transform a respectable career into a monument -something so comprehensive and final, this was my plan, as to be utterly irreftuable - I received, while standing as chance would have it at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge, the phonecal that informed me of my son's suicide. Thus the opening sentence of Tim Park's tenth novel. But why, on receiving this terrible news, does Christopher Burton immediately decide that he must leave his Italian wife of almost thirty years standing? Why does he find it so difficult to focus on his grief for his son? Burton feels his pious, raffish and mercurial wife gave him his life in Italy and his career as the foremost journalist on Italian affairs. But surely she ia also the person who has made life impossible for him. Was their son somehow a victim of their explosive love and hate? Or is that thought simply the expression of a deep paranoia? (19990318)

Tim Park's novels include Tongues of Flame, which won the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards, Loving Roger, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Cara Massimina and Mimi's Ghost. His non-fiction work includes the bestselling Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and Adultery & Other Diversions. His ninth novel Europa was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize. Tim Parks lives in Italy. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.