THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408040626
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
SHEAR
TIM PARKS
Grove Press. 211 pp. $21.
A CRAFTSMAN OF wickedly witty and dark-tending social comedies, British writer Tim Parks (Home Thoughts, Goodness) changes directions with his new thriller, Shear.
The author, who lives and teaches in Verona, Italy, once again sets his novel outside England, in this case in some unnamed Mediterranean country. His protagonist, Peter Nicholson, is a geological inspector whose task is to investigate and write a report on the operations of a granite mining company, but whose main interests lie in his affair with a young woman, Margaret, and a new fling in the offing with his exquisitely beautiful translator, Thea. The question immediately is whether Parks can generate any sympathy for a three-timing cad.
Parks adds further difficulties to a self-deluding central character: The novel is filled with geology-speak, far beyond ``stone'' and ``rock.'' Looking at a piece of granite, Nicholson makes this notation: ``The feldspar crystals were noticeably smaller, reducing the porphyritic look of the rock he had seen quarried at Palinu, and there was a more regular orientation, elongated flakes lining up across the slab, suggesting that this rock had come from the very edge of its pluton.''
Such language, at first a barrier to anyone unfamiliar with its technicalities, gives readers something of the world view of a person who makes a living by close analysis and precise terminology - someone unable, or unwilling, to take the larger view.
Yet the language finally has another function, one prompted by the plot itself. Early in his investigation, Nicholson meets an insistent woman, Mrs. Owen, whose husband has been killed on the building project in Australia that is being supplied by the company under investigation. One of the granite facade panels had broken, and a piece hit Jerry Owen. Mrs. Owen wants justice, but Nicholson sees her as an annoyance; rather than embrace principles, he makes reports on minutiae.
But the cause of death - a ``shear,'' pressure from two indirectly opposing forces that leads to breakage - has much to do with Nicholson's own life. His affairs do not occur in a vacuum. His wife calls and leaves messages; she's pregnant, and if he does not make contact with her, she's going to have an abortion.
Parks deftly works an alienating vocabulary into a set of metaphors for Nicholson's life; substrata, forces, breaking points, microfractures, have equal application to man and rock. Mrs. Owen's banter catches the geologist unawares, and he stumbles into mysteries, cover-ups and oddities beyond his expertise that force him both into and out of himself.
Parks resists the most formulaic dimensions of the genre. The book is, per specs, thrilling, but rarely in a physical sense. Nevertheless, the press of the material world upon the psychological grows increasingly intense, until they finally unite in an explosion of insight.
Shear, more unnerving, elemental and complex than the usual ``exciting'' and ``fast-paced'' story of this genre, shows that Tim Parks can do something other than tweak eccentrics. MEMO: Jeffrey Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University in
Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
THOMAS PRITSCHET
Geology mirrors life for the main character in Tim Parks' thriller
``Shear.''
by CNB