Muddying the waters

This fitfully involving, but for the most part irritating, melodrama is Tim Parks’s 14th novel, and not one of his best. Set almost entirely in India, it begins with the funeral of one Albert James, a trailblazing anthropologist whose elliptical, wide-ranging theories never really took root, and it ends with the death of his widow, Helen, an aid worker, some months later.

Parks concerns himself with the interior lives of his characters as they negotiate grief and curiosity about the dead man’s unfinished research (Parks admits in a note that James was loosely inspired by the social scientist Gregory Bateson). But none of them ever quite comes into focus — including the main character, John.

John is the son of Albert and Helen (although what would a melodrama be without some doubt cast on a character’s biological parentage?). Still in his early twenties, he arrives in India hoping to see his father’s body before the cremation. Having spent much of his childhood in boarding school, he nurses feelings of hurt and neglect. But he is proud of his father and eager to receive some kind of posthumous blessing, or at least insight.

On the one hand, he is thwarted; on the other, he gets more than he bargained for. Albert, he discovers, had become involved with pretty (an adjective Parks resorts to repeatedly) young girls in ways that the author never convincingly explains or explores. Was it all just part of his research, or did he take things further, and if so, how much further? What were the consequences?

It does sound intriguing, doesn’t it? But Parks’s refusal to make things clear is typical of his manipulative use of suspense. In similar fashion, he continually interrupts the narrative at moments of imminent revelation to examine events from a different perspective.