David Park’s Travelling In A Strange Land
A man called Tom is setting off on a journey
in the dead of winter to bring his son back home again. The boy, Luke, has
gotten sick while at the University of Sunderland – he’s not ill enough to go
to the hospital, but he is feeling awful and he just wants to be looked after
by his mum. The problem is that a freak blizzard has closed all the airports
and made driving on the roads treacherous. Tom and his wife Lorna live on the
Ards Peninsula in eastern Northern Ireland and getting to Sunderland will
entail a ferry crossing from Belfast to Cairnryan and then a drive across
Scotland and northern England. Tom, Lorna and their young daughter Lily help
pack their trusty RAV4 full of food, water sleeping bags, a torch and in case
he gets stranded, Lilly solemnly gives him her toy wig-wam tent. Tom waves
drives away from the house, skids on the bend at the bottom of the road, nearly
crashes right at the start but makes it to the Belfast docks.
Thus
begins Irish writer David Park’s tenth novel. Park writes in the lyrical,
psychologically acute tradition of the late twentieth century masters of the
Irish short story John McGahern and William Trevor but his style remains nimble
and flexible enough so that discussions of Morrissey’s lyrics, Brexit
shenanigans and the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not seem out of place. Park,
born in 1954, is a near contemporary of Colm Toibin and Sebastian Barry but
unlike those two Dublin based novelists, Park flew largely under the radar as
an English teacher in Belfast until the publication of The Truth Commissioner
(2008) which found him a whole new audience. The Truth Commissioner was a
masterful exploration of what life was like in post-conflict Ulster, as the
province, ten years removed from Troubles, struggled with a kind of collective
post traumatic stress disorder.
Travelling
In A Strange Land also deals with some aspects of the city’s recovery from
three decades of low level civil war (there is a flashback to Tom dealing with a
vicious paramilitary who is bothering his primary school teacher wife) but Park
is more invested in delving deep into Tom’s personality and his relations
with his family, all of which become manifest as the book progresses.
Park
flits skillfully between the present drive through Scotland, Tom’s recollections
of his past and dialogues that Tom has with his Lorna, Lilly, his ailing son
Luke and his enigmatic lost son Daniel. Tom is a photographer and he has a bold
visual painter’s eye for landscape and place. He imagines himself like one of
“Brueghel’s trudging hunters who return from foraging for food in the
wilderness” to an indifferent village who “don’t rush to greet them or
understand anything of what they have endured.”
Like
the Hunters in the Snow, Tom does endure physical hardship on the journey
across Scotland, helping out the victim of a nasty car accident but Park is
more fascinated, like the German poet Novalis (also a Brueghel devotee), in the
inward journey which is “The Way full of mystery.”
Tom
paints himself as an ordinary bloke in an ordinary middle class job taking
photographs of school kids and newly-weds but in fact he’s a man who “has come
to understand the truth of what Ansel Adams said: you don’t make a photograph just
with a camera, but [with] all that you have seen, the books you have read, the
music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
Nowhere
in Europe or possibly the world has the Christian religion failed as
spectacularly as Ireland with its history of abuse, blood feud and the toxic ‘Narcissism
of the Small Differences’ between different sects; Tom like many disaffected
Irish people has carved out an intriguing personal mythology that bespeaks an
older religion vested in totemic places in the land. Tom imagines himself in
Belfast’s hidden river, the Farset, (the origin of the city's name - Béal
Feirste) which has long been culverted over and flows now like the Styx under
the feet of the living and the dead. In Tom’s mind we visit Ulster’s ancient
holy places, the Giant’s Causeway, The Dark Hedges and when Tom’s troubled eldest
son Daniel disappears from home Tom seeks him out in Belfast’s facetiously
named Holy Land: Jerusalem Street, Palestine Street, Damascus Street, Carmel
Street. Tom eventually finds Daniel, like his Biblical namesake, fallen among
the Babylonians, where he fares rather worse than the dream weaver of King Nebuchadnezzar.
The
Old Testament Daniel is saved from the lions by an Angel of the Lord and as we
travel east with Tom towards the sunrise we realise that his secret destination
is Antony Gormley’s massive steel statue The Angel of the North just outside of
Sunderland.
“What
is the purpose of this journey?” Tom asks himself on page one and by the end we
know that the journey has two purposes: to rescue his ailing younger son and to
seek to lay to rest his guilt over how he somehow lost the prodigal older boy.
Like
the extraordinary 2013 Stephen Knight film Locke
the action in Travelling takes place almost entirely in a car in the
protagonist’s own head and yet this is somehow a visually arresting, gripping
and completely compelling novel from one of Ireland best contemporary writers.