Tim Parks: Rapids

Tim Parks could talk underwater about the strangely exhilarating feeling of hanging upside down in a kayak. "You go into the dark and your mind lights up," he says. "You become extremely alert."

A self-confessed addictive-personality type, Parks is careful about the things he tries. He has never dared go near his son's shoot-the-terrorist video games, insisting "they're too exciting". So he should have known better than to sign up for white-water rafting lessons. For the past several years, two or three times a week, the British expat has kayaked in the mountains near his home in Verona, Italy.

But there's one addiction Parks has never fought, and that's his writing. So to lessen his guilt at being hooked, Parks worked his experiences of running rapids into a novel.

Opening with the warning: "Canoeists beware! This book is not a guide for a safe descent", Rapids is a literary romp which offers that rare combination of helter-skelter pace and philosophical depth.

It examines the shifting allegiances of a party of canoeists over a one-week expedition in the glacial waters of the South Tyrol. Emerging as the novel's mainspring is the recently bereaved Keith, a clapped-out financier seeking regeneration in the white water.

Heading the "community experience" is the straggly-bearded environmentalist Clive, who shuttles between countries attending anti-globalisation marches. Clive's girlfriend Michela is unhinged by his sudden refusal to sleep with her, offering only the opaque and ominous reason that: "This is isn't the right world for us."

Clive is prone to sermonising about the retreating alpine glaciers, but Rapids is no moist-eyed eco-adventure; if Parks wanted to write a tract about climate change he would have "used a more sympathetic character to represent the position".

Parks was anxious, when writing Rapids, about the tendency of the literary elite to lift their noses at novels about sports. But it's only natural that so serious a writer would explore an activity he sees as "a manifestation of modernity". For Rapids is as much a novel of ideas as thrills. The novel's intellectual backbone is sculpted from what Parks argues is the relationship between the proliferation of extreme sports and the Death of God.

"The emotions that once attached themselves to religion now manifest themselves in other phenomena," he says, suggesting that his characters throw themselves into kayaking with a religious intensity.

"Christianity has shrunk to little more than an ethical code obsessed with what's right and wrong and with almost nothing to say about the exper-ience of being alive in the world. So now you even see professing Christians seeking religious experience outside the Church."

But these quests for self-affirmation almost inevitably fail, removed as white-knuckle sports are from one's personal or political commitments.

Through the over-earnest eco-warrior Clive, Parks explores the common frustration of white-water rafters "that their courage might have gone into more useful adventures". As Parks explains, "Despite the adrenaline and self-esteem that comes with mastering fear, something is missing. We're not searching for weapons of mass destruction or exploring the extremities of the globe. There's not even any pretence of exploration or discovery."

Parks laments that literary authors have long been ambivalent about the novel of action. He rejects the blindfolded allegiance of academic communities "to Joyce's view that a man's character is best revealed by how he breaks his egg".

"That's not what I need to know about him. What I need to know is whether he's going to betray me — how he'll act when a particular thing happens. It's extraordinary how they've kowtowed to Joyce's view," he says.

Parks wasn't chasing any romantic notions of la dolce vita when he set up home in Italy two decades ago. With a growing pile of unpublished manuscripts, he decided to "come to Italy and under-achieve in peace, because everybody was bothering me about the fact that I was under-employed".

His determination paid off. Tongues of Flame, the first manuscript Parks penned in Italy, was published in 1985. The novel was a thinly fictionalised account of Parks' childhood, as the son of an evangelical Anglican clergyman. "Because my family was quite divided, with my brother being aggressively atheist and very '60s, with long hair and dope, there was a huge amount of tension as these charismatic tools were exercised inside the family," he says. "It was pretty wild."

Despite the exorcisms, healings and speaking in tongues that consumed his family home, Parks insists that his childhood was not unusual for a novelist. "Twenty-five per cent of the writers in the UK have come out of those situations." His parents' fundamentalism didn't rub off directly on Parks, who renounced God as a teenager. But, he says: "It seems to me that by becoming a writer, a clergyman's son takes up his father's profession, but wields it against him in a secular form of the profession, full of preaching, as it were, which is against preaching."

Parks has no desire to preach in written Italian, citing Milan Kundera as testimony to the danger of switching languages. "His work has absolutely crashed since he started writing in French," he says. Parks, whose translating credits include the work of iconoclastic Italian writer Roberto Calasso, sees Kundera's insistence on translators reproducing his precise stylistic tricks as impossibly naive. "You very rapidly understand when you translate that the text really only exists in its original form," he says.

"That a bunch of professors in Sweden reading work from languages all over the world can come to any decision about anything is an absurd notion, yet the Nobel seems to be generally accepted as a sensible project."

Parks has taught at the University of Milan for the past 12 years, but only this year has he finally been made a professor. After a decade of crossing legal swords with the university bureaucracy, in a battle for a tenured position, Parks speaks acidly of his adopted country's resistance to foreigners. "It's a country where you really have to be an initiate to move forward," he says. "It's a very slippery pole for a foreigner to climb."

Other than writing in English, Parks has distanced himself from his British roots. His novels are generally set in Italy, and his reading consists almost entirely of European writers. Parks feels fortunate that he was removed from literary London as an emerging novelist, never having become entangled in the "whole social game that has nothing to do with books".

But he concedes his career might have suffered because of his exile. "In terms of celebrity or sales more might have been achieved had I been in London," he admits. "But I'm the kind of guy who would have argued with everybody, so they might have hated me."

* Tim Parks, British writer, based in Italy since 1981; author of black comic novels including Europa, Judge Savage (both nominated for the Booker Prize), Cara Massamina, Mimi's Ghost; and non-fiction classics Italian Neighbours and Italian Education.

* Secker & Warburg, $ 36.95