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 Parks should have known better than to sign up for white-water rafting lessons. Two or three times a week the British expat kayaks in the mountains near his Verona home. Writing is the only addiction Parks has never fought. To lessen his guilt at becoming hooked, Parks worked his experiences 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 glacier-fed waters of Italy's South Tyrol. Emerging as the novel's mainspring is the recently bereaved Vince, 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 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 literary silvertails 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. It's intellectual backbone is Parks' notion of the link 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 experience of being alive in the world. So, now you even see professing Christians seeking religious experience outside the Church.'
