Understanding the subtle complexities of humanity
Four years ago, David Park was feeling drained. His sixth novel, The Truth Commissioner, had been well received. Shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year, it was also a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. But the teacher from Co Down felt he needed to write a new chapter.
“My wife told me I should lighten up,” he says, with a rare laugh. “She was saying I should write a book about love.”
That flummoxed him. Explaining to her how hard it is to write about love without being sentimental, and writing without any depth, he realised he could examine the origins of love. He could write about the subtle complexities of marriage, of family and parenthood. And in The Light of Amsterdam, he’s come up with a delicate exposition of the burden love brings.
All Park’s books have explored what it is to be human. “The novel is the best medium for helping us to understand the complexities of humanity, by illustrating the flaws and the strengths. Sometimes, as a writer, your book illuminates something for you as you write. By the time I’d finished this one, I understood that love is the price to be paid for bringing a child into the world.”
His novels have received ecstatic reviews for their insight and graceful prose. But the 58-year-old is quietly spoken, and modest. There’s a sense that he carries the weight of the world.
He always writes beautifully about teenagers. Rachel, an academic teen in Swallowing the Sun was so well drawn, I came away from that book with a better understanding of my middle daughter.
Jack is the only teenager to feature in this new novel. A troubled boy whose life revolves around his computer in a parallel world, Jack is an unwilling companion to his father, Alan, on a trip to see Bob Dylan play in Amsterdam. The other characters also have issues with their offspring.
Single mother Karen, accompanying her daughter Shannon on her hen weekend, learns the depth of Shannon’s selfishness and duplicity. Marion, in Amsterdam on a birthday weekend, is more concerned with conserving her marriage; but there’s that nagging worry about her grown daughter; about whether she has a relationship and if she’s happy.
The novel is told from the points of view of Alan, Karen and Marion. All three feel at odds with the world. At a junction in their lives, they are struggling with deep anxieties for the future.
Park’s main protagonists, in the book, are looking for light. “I liked that ideal of taking people out of their normal environment, and letting them see their lives from a new perspective. That geographical and emotional distance from their origins, and the influence of the light of the City, somehow brings everything into a sharper relief.”
A teacher for the past 34 years, Park stopped teaching two years ago. He has yearned, for years, to be a full time writer. He is already a third of the way through his next novel. It’s a triptych, telling the lives of three poets wives; two based on real lives, and one fictitious. “It’s the first time, ever, that I’ve done research as a writer. And so far, I’m finding the experience positive.”
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