Finding one’s rightful place in the solitude of the Alps

RAPIDS

By Tim Parks

Arcade, $24, 246 pages

REVIEWED BY SUDIP BOSE

One winter afternoon more than a year ago, I went hiking with a friend. The air was cold, the woods were empty, and as we climbed a modest mountainside, our quiet conversation began to die away. For three hours, I was aware only of my surroundings: the stony trail, the leafless trees, the occasional deer, the striking views of the valley below.

During our descent, my friend’s cell phone rang. He took the call and started to talk, and whatever mystery there had been in the woods — in that cold wintry silence that I’d escaped the city to find — was gone, replaced by the jarring noise of everyday life. Just then, another hiker approached us, bounding up the mountainside. As he passed, he glanced at my friend, still in the midst of conversation, shook his head disapprovingly, and said to me, “You just can’t get away from it, can you.”

I recalled this episode when reading Tim Parks’ superb new novel, “Rapids,” about a group of 11 English kayakers on a five-day paddling trip in the Italian Alps. Though the adventurers find themselves in a remote world of pristine beauty — with “solid slopes rising steeply through gleaming meadow and dark pine,” “barren walls of rock,” and “patches of snow shining distantly to cap dizzying cliffs of dark stones” — the trappings of modern life intrude nevertheless. Cell phone calls are made, text messages are sent, the nearest town’s Internet cafe is visited. Indeed, the tension between the primitive and the modern is everywhere in Mr. Parks’ novel: He seems to ask, Can we continue to explore the natural world, search out its mysteries, with cell phones in our pockets?

In several wonderful novels (such as “Destiny” and “Europa”) as well as personal essays and an absolute classic work of nonfiction (“A Season With Verona,” about hooliganism and Italian football), Mr. Parks has created one of the most literary and literate bodies of work of any writer today. But his books always entertain (a quality that should not be looked down upon); his writing gives tremendous pleasure.

Perhaps it is Mr. Parks’ skill at manipulating suspense, at plunging the reader into a scene and pulling him quickly out, so that he is eager for another dip. Certainly the writer’s staccato, almost breathless prose in “Rapids” is exhilarating to read, befitting a novel in which dangerous whitewater rapids figure so prominently.

The English kayakers in “Rapids” include Vince, an important bank executive who has recently lost his wife to a stroke and who has brought along his daughter, Louise, to Italy. The group’s instructor, Clive, is everything Vince is not: headstrong, magnetic, daring, virtuosic on the water: “He wishes he were in another era, exploring virgin territory, commanding soldiers.”

He is also rather flat, as E.M. Forster would have put it. That is, Clive tends to espouse a single set of ideas; he is a leftist and an environmentalist who rarely departs from his denunciations of globalization and global warming. His foil, Adam, is similarly flat, sounding notes from the right wing as predictably as Clive does from the left.

More interesting (and complicated) is Clive’s partner, the beautiful Italian Michela. “I hate my mother tongue,” she thinks. “I hate this country,” meaning Italy. Indeed, she is the Anglophile’s Anglophile, speaking fluent, nearly accent-less English: “Her destiny is England and English. She feels this deeply. To become truly strong, she must leave Italy.”

But in disdaining her motherland, Michela has lost her own identity, due in no small part to her attraction to — one might say hero worship of — Clive. While kayaking, “she was aware of emulating his deft certainty;” on shore, by his side, “she had never felt more protected.” As the novel begins, Clive breaks off his relationship with Michela, and so the novel dramatizes the Italian girl’s necessary transformation, from disciple to master.

Indeed, the novel is filled with such human dramas. Some are innocent: the inevitable first loves and holiday flings that arise when teenagers (and adults) are far from home. And some are cathartic; Vince, who emerges from this large cast of characters as the novel’s protagonist and most sympathetic figure, will embark on an inner journey that is the novel’s essence.

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