How to resist the urge to tell Tim Parks's story as a fairytale? Once upon a time, let's say, there was a highly driven, copiously talented author who'd nevertheless spent his writing life as a fixture of the midlist. Consistent, productive, a superb stylist and natural critic (a contributor to the NYRB and LRB), his work garnered fine reviews and minor prizes, but he couldn't quite parlay these into major awards or, crucially, sales. One day, though, opportunity – disguised as disaster – came knocking. Parks found himself beset by an insupportable array of physical complaints: "a general smoldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis". When his doctors couldn't explain his symptoms, much less resolve them, he was drawn down a path that carried him, via a submersive encounter with Vipassana meditation, not only back to wellness, but to a profoundly altered view of the contours of his life. What's more – the fairytale twist – the crisis in his health led inadvertently to the wider professional recognition he'd been craving. As well as the usual glowing notices (from such writers as Will Self, David Lodge and JM Coetzee), his account of his journey, Teach Us to Sit Still, sold upwards of 30,000 copies and installed Parks in his rightful place in the vanguard of contemporary British literature. Adversity was triumphed over, the narrative arc neatly achieved. Everyone lived happily ever after. The end.
Except, of course, not. We meet on a bright, clean summer's day in Milan, where Parks, who lives in Verona with his wife and children, teaches at the university. Ostensibly, we're here to talk about his new novel, The Server, but in practice it's impossible to disentangle his latest work of fiction, which unfolds over a 10-day period on a meditation retreat, from the experiences that inspired it. And as Parks repeatedly makes plain in his memoir – surely the most brilliant and illuminating example of a critic reading his own life since Lorna Sage's Bad Blood – his irresistible hankering for the narrative arc was a critical part of his problem. Meditation soothed the pains that plagued him because, to practice it effectively, he was forced to wriggle out from under the words with which he constantly framed his experience and consider a physical self that he'd heretofore ignored. For decades, Parks observes, "all purposeful mental activity, for me, had been linguistic … Everything had to be lived through language or it wasn't lived at all; to the point that I couldn't really see a painting or a film or a game of football until I had thought about it in words, or preferably talked about it, or better still written about it." In order to let go of the agonising constriction in his body he had to "unlearn" half a century's worth of "tense and somehow, I felt, language-driven behaviour".
"I think," he says now, half a decade on from the events that triggered the book, "that Teach Us to Sit Still ended up being a criticism of narrative. It was saying that one's constant engagement with narrative – the presentation of one's own life to oneself as an ongoing trajectory – is what feeds the frenetic voice in your head. I don't think of myself as Buddhist, in spite of all the meditation, but I'm attracted to some of the common sense of Buddhism. And one idea is that maybe it's possible to live without that sort of self-narrative."
It's a pretty sort of paradox for any professional writer, but one which, you suspect, resonates for Parks with particular clarity. Over the course of the book he's forced to confront the question of whether, in order to achieve long-term equanimity, he should jettison his career – and while it's tough to think of a writer who wouldn't balk at the notion, it's tougher to picture one who'd balk more violently than Parks. For him, a literary career mattered, mattered terribly. He began writing while studying for a PhD at Harvard and was instantly hooked, his ambition surviving not only the customary years of spirit-sapping encounters with disengaged publishers and dilatory agents but also the cultural and linguistic trauma of a full-scale relocation to Italy. Parks met and married his Italian wife, Rita, in the US; the pair returned to England but, with Rita unable to find work, upped sticks and headed south, settling in Verona despite the fact that Parks spoke "not a word" of Italian. It was, he concedes now, "very unhealthy. I'm a chatterer; it's important for me to talk! I spent two hours every weekday in the public library, reading Italian novels, and there was a period when I underlined every fucking word that I didn't know, and learned it. It took me two years; two years of being completely dependent."
This battle to make himself understood in his adopted country mirrored Parks's parallel struggle to find an outlet for his writing in his homeland. He approached the written word with the same doggedness as he did the spoken, turning out "about seven novels" before getting a sniff of publication. Inevitably, the two tangled; a retreat to the UK became even more unthinkable without success in his chosen field. "I really didn't," he says, "want to go back as a failure. I love London, but I didn't want to have to compare myself with anybody, to watch the rise of the McEwans and the Amises in any great detail."
In the end, fluency in the Italian language came before the book deal; the tale of how the latter occurred shows, he says, "how easily it might not have happened. I'd sent this manuscript, Tongues of Flame, to a former teacher at Cambridge, and he submitted it for the Sinclair prize" – for unpublished manuscripts. "It was accepted, and it went on to win the Somerset Maugham prize. So there you go: a huge slice of luck really. The real problem was that the book was a family biography of sorts, in which I represented my parents as slightly loopy. When the publisher accepted it, they sent it back to my then-agent, who used to send packages care of my mother, and she unthinkingly posted it to her. So the first I knew of it was my mum on the phone crying and saying 'You betrayed me!'"
His mother's reaction becomes clearer when you read the novel and realise the loopiness Parks is describing isn't of the common-or-garden variety. The youngest of three children of "hyper-religious parents" – his father was a "missionary-minded" Anglican vicar - initially, their set-up was only ordinarily unusual: after a childhood dominated by his brother's near-death from polio, the family moved to Finchley, where the house "was always full of people, from every social stratum" including, memorably, the local MP, Margaret Thatcher, who used to come round to tea. But when Parks was 12, things got, as he puts it, "briefly loony". His parents became involved with the charismatic movement – "the religious version of flower power", a spiritual branch of Christianity involving speaking in tongues and the laying-on of hands. It's this territory that Parks covers in Tongues of Flame.
"There were major polarities in the family," he remembers. "The first was between good and evil: everybody was one or the other, everybody. The second was between my brother and my sister. He'd been so close to death for so long that he wasn't locked into the idea of sin like my parents were; he was interested in life. And he pushed them. One Christmas we had half the sad people of the parish eating with us. John arrives in his Afghan coat with this girl who looks as though she's been pulled out of a French movie, and they go upstairs and start shagging! Then there was my sister who was super-pious, and the fights between her and my brother were epic. And me in the middle just wishing everybody would shut up!"
Possibly a desire to escape the London literary set wasn't the only spur to a move overseas. At any rate, Italy also proved the catalyst for the non-fiction which, with the exception of his Booker-shortlisted novel Europa, would prove to be his bread and butter. Parks had been in Italy for a decade when the book trade was galvanised by the success of A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle's affable account of expat encounters with colourful locals. The hunt was on for similar chronicles of life in foreign climes, and Mayle's literary agent got in touch with Parks to see if he could deliver. "I said you've seen my novels, they're pretty black: this isn't me!" Parks remembers. "Plus, I'd been here a while, and didn't arrive with money, didn't do all the putting in a swimming pool stuff. But he said we'll offer you much more than you'll make with any of your novels. We had a child and another on the way, so I thought I'd have a go. I started describing this strange out-of-town industrial condominium where we were living – four families constantly arguing, endless legal cases, very Italian – and I thought, wow, this feels fantastic. It seemed to trigger a different voice; a pleasanter one. But I sent the first chapters through, and the publisher said 'this is not the kind of material that invites the English middle classes to dream of moving to Italy'! Funnily enough, he was wrong; it was saying that things can be shit, but also 'there's something interesting here'." In the end Parks wrote the book, Italian Neighbours, on spec; it did well, and a second was commissioned. His instinct for non-fiction remained spot on, right up to Teach Us to Sit Still. "When I sent the first chapter to my agent at the time, he said don't go there. But I knew it would tap into something. And it did."
Which brings us back to where we started – another arc, of which Parks might well profess to disapprove. And the fact we're here talking about his latest novel proves, in a way, that he's right to reject the demands of narrative: if this were a fairytale, Parks's inability to learn his lesson and give up storifying would have meant a relapse into illness, but as things stand, he's both still well and still writing. The true freedom, perhaps, is that having achieved the career success he yearned for for so long, he no longer needs to care much about it. He seems, leaning back in his chair in the beneficent Milanese sunlight, to be a man supremely at ease with himself, with his life and with his writing; secure in the hard-won knowledge that the fairytale ending is a mirage.
