DAVID PARK - TRAVELLING IN A STRANGE LAND

Subjectively, I love David Park. He’s from Northern Ireland. He sets his novels in places that are familiar. He deals with our issues. Much more than that he has a great taste in music and references my kind of artist in his stories. Dylan, U2 and Van Morrison have all been in there! David Park is subjectively my kind of novel.

Objectively, I love David Park. He writes so well. His prose are poetic, he sets you in scenes that you can almost tangibly touch. His characters are authentic and believable. He litters his book with one line nuggets of wisdom or discussion starters. Ireland has some great novelists. We fight above our weight. David Park might be the most gifted of them all!

Travelling In A Strange Land, as always, uncannily touches my own life. Last summer I read his 1996 novel Stone Kingdoms. It is about a girl growing up as a minister’s daughter! U2 get mentioned very early on. It touches the Northern Irish Troubles before ending up for most of it in Africa doing development. He knows me… 

This summer it was Travelling In A Strange Land and it is about a father, Tom, who drives to Sunderland to pick up his son from University during a winter freeze that has closed airports and most everything else. I once drove that very route to Sunderland when my parents drove me there to start at Sunderland Poly (which became University) in 1980. I only stayed 3 days but we did it! Then the father plays Van Morrison’s Snow In San Anselmo.

I once got off the ferry Tom travels on and did the same road in the early hours of a freezing winter morning. While my wife and Iain Archer slept, I crawled nervously with full concentration at 20mph. I understood the journey Park’s describes. David Park might have crashed the hard drive of my life!

Like me, this father does a lot of his thinking while driving and we get to travel inside his head as he travels through difficult road conditions. It is a fascinating ploughing up of thoughts on life and family and music! It then takes a more dangerous bend as we realise that this father has something very heavy, very deep down to contemplate and deal with. His other son appears as a ghost. The story builds. The father needs redemption in forgiving himself.

As this father drives you find yourself becoming a traveling companion. You want to be there to listen to him and somehow help. You also find yourself dealing with your own inner geography. Park has said that he wanted to delve as deeply as he could into a man’s heart and soul. Boy he does and takes you with him.

I am also fascinated that the book is, in the end, about forgiveness. Park dealt with that in his most famous novel to date, The Truth Commissioner. Then it was social forgiveness around our political Troubles. Here it is personal. It is not about forgiving others but about forgiving yourself. 

I believe that forgiveness is one of the most important questions in life. Like Tom, we all carry a lot that we need to deal with. How will we? For many of us our faith is the space we deal with that, regularly. What if like Tom you don’t have a faith? Without transcendence or higher philosophical belief where do you go? 

Travelling In A Strange Land is short novel but filled with great prose and helpful maps to navigate the heart and soul.