Some people join the Foreign Legion to forget, but Beth Marriot joins a Buddhist retreat. Beth, the protagonist of Tim Parks’s new novel, has gone to ground at the Dasgupta meditation centre not as a meditator — she’s done that already — but as a server, one of the volunteers who wake to the sound of a gong at four in the morning and crew the kitchen. It’s very different from her previous rock’n’roll lifestyle, where her wild ways seem to have caused a young man’s death.
A couple of years ago Parks published a nonfiction book about his own experience of Buddhist meditation, which helped him with various medical problems (despite his reluctance to embrace Buddhism as a religion). The Server is a kind of fictional pendant to the earlier book, allowing Parks to make use of his left-over scepticism in the persona of Beth.
Beth is trouble, with a flirtatiously extrovert manner to match her spectacularly noticeable breasts, like “two spanking red Ferraris double-parked on a zebra”. The apple of temptation comes when she finds a diary belonging to a male meditator, which he has been keeping despite the fact that writing — along with sex — is strictly forbidden. The diarist harbours some rebellious thoughts about the meditation teacher: “The man’s so damn smug. As if we were in a Bombay Rotary Club in the 1960s.” Before long Beth is reading the diary with a fascination that borders on a crush.
The centre’s prohibition on writing chimes with an underlying theme in the book: the idea that perhaps Buddhism and novels are intrinsically at odds. The goal of meditation is to stop the endless chattering in the mind. But all this chatter is well suited to the conventional novel, unlike the selfless realm of meditation, which seems to leave the world of character and narrative behind, just as it leaves desire (“No sex, no story,” as the diarist puts it). It is fair to say there haven’t been many great Buddhist novelists.
The Server is never less than readable, as you would expect from a talented writer such as Parks, but it is not his best book. Beth is both unconvincing and annoying, and her encounter with the diarist is anticlimactic. Ironically, given Parks’s scepticism, the most interesting parts of the book are the fragments of Buddhist insight. As for the writing, there is nothing to match the line Beth encounters from a 7th-century Buddhist text: “Sensual pleasure is like honey on a razor’s edge.” It leaves spanking red Ferraris pretty much standing at the post.
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Harvill Secker £16.99/ebook £17.73 pp278, ST Bookshop price £13.99