So many locks

For Tim Parks the present does not exist – at least not fully. “Perhaps so long as we’re alive all that has happened to us can keep on happening”, reflects the main character in Parks’s new novel, Mr Geography – a sustained exploration of the extraordinary grip that the defining sexual and romantic moments from our past can continue to have on us. There is, in Parks’s world, “no end” to their ability to burst through into the present and continue to shape who we are, “with their twists and turns, their crevasses and fault lines”.

This theme spans Parks’s long career. It forms the spine of his Booker-shortlisted Europa (1997), which with claustrophobic intensity summons the all-encompassing impact of a passionate love affair gone wrong. And it reverberates through his previous novel, Hotel Milano (2023), in which the main character writes in a note to his ex-wife, after a long time with no significant contact, that “the past is always present, which is why life sometimes feels like a dream”.

Mr Geography is another interior monologue that braids the past and present in luminous, slippery ways, the former almost always getting the upper hand. Indeed, Parks’s long preoccupation has perhaps reached its apotheosis, in a story with “no end to the energy of this unfolding”. As in Europa and Hotel Milano, Mr Geography is told from the perspective of a man on a short trip away from home, reflecting on how he has been thrown off course by “life’s rapids”, as Parks writes in Europa. (A keen kayaker, the author also once wrote a novel entitled Rapids, 2005, set among the rivers of South Tyrol.)

In this case the man in question is the geography teacher Daniel Burrow, the headmaster of a private school, who has fallen in love with a woman called Julia – married, the mother of two of his pupils, and a professor of literature with a special interest in D. H. Lawrence. Years into their secret affair, the two of them escape on holiday to Konstanz, on the German-Swiss border, to rejoice in what they hope will be a golden future together while walking in the footsteps of Lawrence, who described his own journey across the Swiss Alps in Twilight in Italy (1916).

Daniel and Julia’s trip is interrupted by a phone call that brings tragic news. Their affair ends and Daniel leaves his job in disgrace. But the present action of this book takes place many years later, with Julia dead and Daniel, now retired from teaching, returning to Konstanz alone to finish the interrupted walk.

Every town and hotel along the route is a Proustian madeleine, transporting him back to his time with Julia, and the results are delightfully disorientating. Time collapses; Daniel’s present-day observations of “hikers and bikers” on the Alpine trails slip seamlessly into memories. It can sometimes be hard to know what is happening when. At one point “a lock turns” and he catches “a fleeting glimpse of two weary figures with blue backpacks pushing through wood-panelled doors” – his former self with Julia. Locks and keys become a motif for this elision of past and present: “so many locks, perhaps, waiting in one’s head for keys to turn them”.

Parks has an enormous amount to play with here. Lawrence, too, eloped with a woman he loved, in defiance of family and society, and on the whole the parallels are dealt with well, despite the occasional clunky moment and wanton allusion. The author has written about his interest in Buddhism in a memoir, Teach Us To Sit Still (2010), and a novel, Sex Is Forbidden (2012; originally entitled The Server). It feels in Mr Geography as if all that meditating is starting to pay off. As much as Daniel’s emotional binds to his painful past continue to have him in their grip, they are loosened by a mellowness and sense of acceptance less common to Parks’s oeuvre. Daniel enjoys his experiences among the varied holidaymakers along the route. The landscape of the Alps inspires mindful thoughts (“Perhaps all silence is one silence. All emptiness one emptiness”). And in the one reference to Julia’s life after their relationship ended, we learn that she would go on to publish a book, “Intimations of Buddhism in D H Lawrence”.

This knowledge makes the novel’s epigraph – Lawrence’s comment in Twilight in Italy that “The kingdom of the world had no significance: what could one do but wander about?” – feel more hopeful than nihilistic: a leavening of the pain so frequently exerted by the worldly past.

Daniel Clarke is Factual Commissioning Editor at BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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