Straying from the Way

No sensible writer wastes good material. A couple of years ago Tim Parks published a memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still, a tale of chronic, debilitating back pain that appeared to have no physical cause. He tried everything, short of major surgery, and even toyed with that for a while. Finally, in desperation, this lifelong sceptic took up meditation, and found to his amazement that it worked.

By the book’s end we realised that we had been reading not so much about a man’s ill health as about a very particular and challenging midlife crisis. Parks is a novelist and academic who has lived and worked in Italy for the best part of 30 years: a pleasant enough existence, you would have thought, but middle age gets us all in the end. Old ways of living start to fail you, and you have to find new ones. And the more immune you think you are to this process, the more vulnerable you actually are.

Like all the best writers, though, Parks’s life feeds his fiction, even to its detriment (in Teach Us to Sit Still he admitted that one or two of his recent novels may have suffered because his back hurt so much). So it should come as no great shock that in this, his 15th novel, we find ourselves in a Buddhist retreat, where the troubled and traumatised come to meditate their way out of whatever ails them.

Not that the Dasgupta Institute is any sort of holiday camp. Sex is banned, men and women are strictly segregated, all conversation is discouraged and there are never quite enough bananas to go round at breakfast.

Our narrator (not wholly reliable) is Beth Marriot, the sort of bright, bold young woman traditionally described by blurb-writers as ‘feisty’.