Jon Day

Back to basics | 30 March 2017

His latest novel, In Extremis, returns once again to middle-aged infidelity — but its narrator is only interesting to himself

Tim Parks is a writer of some very fine books indeed, which makes it even more of a shame that his most recent novel is flat, grim and (like its narrator) interesting only to itself. His main theme is adultery, a subject he explored in his wonderful novel Europa (1997), in the short story collection Talking About It (2005), and in the thoughtful essays of Adultery and Other Diversions (1998). But in recent years he has become the laureate of a certain kind of seedy, middle-aged infidelity, and In Extremis is single-minded to the point of obsession: anorak and dirty mac in one.

The problem might be that he is simply too productive. In Extremis is a loose sequel to Thomas And Mary (2016) a novel that explored the breakup of a marriage from a range of narrative perspectives. But where that book sustained your interest, and rewarded it, by playing with narrative focus and ways of exploring the fallout of adultery (though, strikingly, never from the perspective of the cheatee), In Extremis concentrates, exclusively and tediously, on the thoughts and feelings of Thomas, the unfaithful partner.

Thomas is an academic in his fifties. Divorced from his wife after years of cheating, he now lives in Spain with his girlfriend Elsa, 30 years his junior. As the novel opens he is attending a conference on ‘Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome’ (Parks has written about his own struggles with the condition in Teach Us to Sit Still (2010), his weirdly compelling book about yoga). At the conference he meets a groovy Californian doctor who talks him into undergoing anal massage therapy. It’s a setup that Parks seems to think is ripe for toilet humour, but he doesn’t manage to squeeze many laughs out of it.

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