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Review [published August 2000]
Tim Parks: Destiny
Stephen Mitchelmore
I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of
adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what
happened after the astronauts make it back to Earth,
or the killer is caught, or the girl is finally got. I find
the peace at the end of, say, Event Horizon, deeply
frustrating. The credits run and immediately I feel the
need to inhabit the silence and apparent serenity of the
surviving characters. Even in a poor film. Instinctively,
I ask: what are the characters thinking now? How will
the events affect the rest of their lives? How will they
‘come to terms’ with what has happened? How will they
tell the story to their friends? Despite the insistence of
these questions – does anybody else ask them? – we
don’t seem to want to know the answers. I mean, we
never see films about them. We want only action.
Such indifference suggests a deep-seated pathological
fear at the heart of popular culture. It’s not like we
are all Odysseus, shedding experience like some
fancy-dress outfit. Experience makes us who we are.
We are stuck with responses, memories and responses
to memories. I suppose we watch films like Event Horizon
to displace them for a while.
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When that film began, I knew my questions would
not be answered. At that point, the roller coaster profile
of the usual Hollywood movie prompted only weariness,
not anticipation. Nevertheless, it was watched
and time was passed pleasurably. Of course, its predictability
was part of the pleasure. The thing is, I wanted
that predictability to be taken to the absolute limit. But
what does this mean in practice? Maybe it’s where time
stands still and the whole picture appears, as in the
uncanny vertigo you feel when you catch your own eye
looking at itself in the mirror. You know you are looking
at yourself – what could be more familiar? – yet
there is also a sense of something alien. It disappears as
soon as you notice it. The absolute limit, then, would be
the noticing and the disappearance combined. So what
would that be like? Well, Tim Parks’ novel Destiny is
a good start. It is an exhilarating experience of vertigo.
The novel begins with the narrator, Chris Burton, a
veteran journalist based in Italy, getting a phone call to
say his son, a patient in a psychiatric hospital, has killed
himself. He tells us this, and many other things, in the
first sentence. It is ten-lines long, and full of clauses
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