Tim Parks's new novel addresses in fiction a milieu and a theme that he explored, with great success, in his memoir Teach Us to Sit Still. The narrator, Beth Marriot, is a volunteer at the Dasgupta Institute, a Buddhist retreat outside London which bans smoking, drinking, and contact between men and women. Meditators come and go, but Beth stays on, to cook and clean. Near the start of the latest 10-day cycle, she creeps into one of the men's bedrooms, where she discovers a diary that records a predicament similar to the one she left behind. Suddenly all the old thoughts, silenced by meditation, return, "shouting and screaming and stamping their feet".
In novels such as Europa and Destiny, Parks developed a sinuous, comma-dependent style to transport the reader around the unchecked obsessions of the neurasthenic, fear-breeding, middle-aged male mind. He proves altogether less comfortable, as both stylist and psychologist, with the same volatility when it attaches itself to someone young and female. Beth's history of rebelliousness is presented in the most obvious terms: she rejected the family business in favour of singing songs ("Mean Hot and Nasty", "Girls Just Want to Have Fun") with the rock band Pocus, and cheated on the sensible Carl, of whom her father approves, with one of her father's peers, Jonathan. Once the diarist is under Beth's skin, even the sight of a bed can set things off: "A sheet and three blankets. He must have asked for an extra. Probably feels the cold. Like Jonathan. Like dad. Older men. Jonathan loved it when I took risks, flashing my tits in the pub or peeing between parked cars. The time we made love in the cinema! Match Point. What a yawn of a film."
Parks threads Beth's reminiscences through an unfolding present, to achieve a balance between drift and drama, but the transitions are jerky. "I remember Carl always complained I treated him like a dog. Carl, do this, Carl, do that. Meantime I've started to bleed. I'll have to go over to main loos and pick up some tampons." "Jonathan. Jonathan Jothanan Thanajon. I thought I'd got you out of my head weeks ago and now you're creeping right into the pre-lunch commotion. It's the diarist's fault. Damn you both. The curry has started to bubble. Ines is happy. Her tits went the way of all flesh years ago." Conflictedness sentiment versus reality, thought versus impulse tends to be portrayed by an about-turn from one sentence to the next: "I miss my piano, my guitar, my wah wah. Not really though." "I didn't plan to go. I went."
Beth's mind surges forward, ruminating ("Why do I [do] stuff like this?" "What do I know?"), rhapsodising ("I love noise and I love silence", "I love washing rice and kichada beans"), condemning ("I hate regret", "I hate Rooibos"), but there's an ambiguity over whether her report comes from the eye of the storm, or from a period of calm afterwards whether her impressions are delivered in high fever or recollected in tranquility. The ambiguity turns out to be more like a contradiction, a bending of the rules of perspective. Beth holds forth in the present only to reveal on the final page: "That was two years ago."
For all its dedication to mental activity, the novel also borrows devices from the thriller, in an effort to generate long-haul interest. Beth, in her narration, and "GH", in his diary, start off cagey but become increasingly explicit as the novel advances. "I flicked back and forth through the pages", Beth writes, "but couldn't find what the dilemma was. There's stuff about a company going under, someone called Susie throwing away her talent ... I reckon L must be his wife." A hundred and fifty pages on, the diarist is in an altogether more voluble mood: "I was a brilliant young man, much older than my age, in need of money and stability to launch an adventurous publishing house that would mark a turning point in English literature." Similarly, near the beginning, Beth confesses to Mrs Harper, one of the retreat's leaders, "I killed someone", but strenuously withholds the details. It's the Graham Swift approach to storytelling secure the reader's interest in the local or the undramatic with a promise, never fully realised, of payback down the line.
If The Server is a rehash of Teach Us to Sit Still, then it's one from which every idiosyncrasy, every point of interest or distinction, has been erased. Instead of a middle-aged writer "the greatest of all sceptics" turning to meditation as a last resort, to relieve his pelvic pain, and discovering a new sense of his mind's relationship with his body, we have a wayward teenager who heads to a retreat after hearing about it "on the ferry back home" from holiday. The novel is in retreat from Buddhism, rather than being a confrontation with it. We follow Beth not over her eight months of mindfulness which would pose a real challenge to representation but the 10-day period during which she lapses into stream-of-consciousness; the Dasgupta Institute, though exhaustively documented, functions as little more than an exotic backdrop to a conventional narrative of crisis and recovery.
