Mr Geography — gripping study of the aftermath of an affair

Tim Parks — equally accomplished in fiction, essays, translation and travel writing — is one of those writers whose name on the cover is more or less a guarantee of a good time for the reader. His books are chewy, original and entertaining. After a pause in writing fiction, he returned last year with Hotel Milano, a grumpy and affecting story and one of the best Covid novels among the many I’ve read.

As if to prove his facility, with his new novel Mr Geography, Parks has taken unpromising material and made it shine. It’s the story of an affair — the oldest game in town — between Dan Burrow, the headmaster of a public school in Yorkshire (and our narrator), and Julia, the mother of two of his pupils.

Or better to say “former affair” and “former headmaster”, because we join Dan’s story when it’s all over, and he’s combing through the wreckage. To help orient himself, he’s recreating a walk he and Julia undertook years before, from Konstanz in Germany to Como in Italy. That earlier walk also followed the footsteps of DH Lawrence, as recorded in his book Twilight in Italy.

Parks walks a nice line between internal reflection and external action

Dan’s own personal twilight journey makes memories erupt. He’s doing it partly for “the pleasure of being in it all again”, and partly because his Alpine walk with Julia was both the peak of their affair and the moment it was punctured by tragedy — and he wants to work out why it happened. (By extension, so do we.)

Mr Geography is an example of how a good book can do two things at once. We want to know how we got here, but also what happens next. Parks switches smoothly between Dan’s present day and his history with Julia, in a clever literary double exposure that never leaves the reader behind. He skewers his narrator’s behaviour, as we learn that he first joined the isolated school in Yorkshire to persuade his wife he wasn’t going to stray. After all, even their daughter had noticed him looking at other women. “Which other women, I asked. I was baffled. All of them, she said.”

As his walk proceeds straightforwardly, Dan’s mind goes round in circles. We are made of our memories, and he recalls that Julia sought to follow DH Lawrence’s advice to reject the ordinary and “live and be free”, and considered an affair with Dan a controlled risk. But then, Lawrence was never a great life coach. (Dan’s mention of Lawrence’s collection of poems Look! We Have Come Through!, about his and his wife’s sexual reawakening, reminded me that Bertrand Russell’s response to the poems was “They may have come through but why should we look?”)

We do ultimately find out what happened, but the answers are buried deep, as memories often are. Parks walks a nice line between internal reflection and external action — doing two things at once again. This blend is so effective that in the last 40 pages, when Dan meets a young couple on his walk, and tense action largely replaces reflection, I almost wished the book hadn’t become such a page-turner. Almost.

Mr Geography by Tim Parks Harvill Secker £14.99, 224 pages

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