the server by tim parks

Times Literary Supplement 25 may 2012

Beth Marriot, the narrator of this ambitious novel, is an emphatically sensual young woman. Although sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute, the strict Buddhist retreat where she has been living for nine months, we are constantly reminded that her sexuality is irrepressible. Perhaps fuelled by the austere environment, she cannot help but mention that her breasts have been described by a former lover, as “a pair of spanking Ferraris” and as “cute cantaloupes” by a virtual stranger. Touching is not even permitted at the retreat but young men, older men and women are all moved to try and touch her.

Her routine now consists of meditation, chopping vegetables and trying to forget her prior life. She can’t help but recall her life before the Dasgupta, however, and the things she did with an older, married boyfriend, “Peeing between cars on Acton Vale, flashing tits in restaurants, blowing him in the cinema”. At the Dasgupta, she is reprimanded for not wearing a bra and subsequently examines the way her nipples protrude through her t-shirt. Later, she worries repeatedly that her period will dirty surfaces she comes into contact with. All this self-consciously earthy detail unfortunately only serves to remind the reader that this female protagonist has been created by a man.

This relentlessly vivacious narrator does, of course, enliven the potentially dreary setting of a Buddhist retreat. The author has practised meditation himself, an experience he wrote about in his memoir of 2010 Teach Us To Sit Still. In spite of these experiences, Parks may have worried that Buddhism’s emphasis on silence does not promise much in the way of dialogue, or action. Even more troubling to a novelist, perhaps, is that meditation aims to help its adherents leave not only their pasts behind, but also any notion they may have of selfhood. Fortunately, the author manages to plausibly portray Beth as an exceptionally bad student. She is unable to forget her past, which is recalled in snatches, or to really abandon her ego. This characterization does of course raise inevitable questions about why she remains committed to the Dasgupta given that she is so ill-suited to it.

Although she comments, “When I’m silent, Beth is in the background”, she cannot rid herself of the desire to communicate. She finds a kindred spirit in a temporary resident at the retreat, whose diary she reads without initially meeting him. He writes “Why do I always write as though this were for somebody else?” and Beth recognizes that her desire to carry on reading the diary is a sign that the Dasgupta way of life is not working for her. Equally, she knows that the fact that she wants to carry on writing the book we are reading proves that she has not absorbed the Dasgupta Manual.

She reminisces about her hedonistic past in a rock band: she was, of course, electric on stage and had relationships with two bandmates simultaneously, one male and one female, as well as her married lover. She can remember a different kind of enlightenment from this period, “Chain smoke, chain drink, chain fuck.”

The trauma that has led her to the Dasgupta is gradually revealed. She was used as a pivot in her parent’s marriage, something that we are reminded of towards the novel’s conclusion. More significantly, however, we know from early on that she was involved in a skinny-dipping accident but we do not know the exact ramifications of this. The withholding of this information for so much of the book, however, seems tricksy and many readers will have been alienated long before this point.

The author ultimately struggles to overcome the sense of voyeurism in his characterization of Beth as a free spirit and this, Park’s sixteenth novel, is frequently tedious and frustrating. In spite of all of this, the long passages of Beth’s repeated attempts to find peace do have a cumulative power. While Beth’s journey is not wholly convincing it does have some resonance.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement