Home Thoughts

Tim Parks

With Tim Parks I've noticed a pattern. While everything he does is rooted in Northern Italy the non-fiction is always about Italians while in his fiction they are always strangely absent, despite the Verona settings. Home Thoughts is no different. It's the story of a group of English lettori at the university of Verona, principally Julia Delaforce, a Londoner fleeing a failed love affair at home. But there are also other English, Canadian and Scottish characters, all of them somehow treading water in Verona, eking out a living teaching and translating and most of them dreaming of abandoning Italy and returning home. But never quite getting round to it. The only Italian characters are barmy girlfriends and bonkers professors. Caricatures and nothing more.

Not that there's anything wrong with a book purely about Brits in Verona. And Julia's Italian adventure is solidly enough plotted. But the book reads like a mess of different styles. It lacks the confidence and consistency of Booker-nominated Europa and I checked and sure enough it was one of his earliest novels. There's a half-hearted attempt to make it a novel of letters (Julia writing home, friends from home writing to Julia, etc) but whether the novelist found it too restrictive or simply gave up is unclear. Whatever the reason, the novel drifts in and out of "letters" mode with little real direction. As if to underline the failure of this strategy, there's even a "meta-fictional" element (is that right word?) with one of Julia's colleagues, an aspiring novelist surely not a million miles away from Tim Parks himself, pondering for several pages his own planned "Home Thoughts" style novel. A bold idea, but even that never really goes anywhere.

If you're a Tim Parks fan like me and if you gobble up every inch of Italian flavoured fiction then you might want to pick this one up. Otherwise, there are better Tim Parks books to curl up with.