Tight in the Cockpit

Joanna Kavenna

  • Rapids by Tim Parks
    Secker, 246 pp, £15.99, March 2005, ISBN 0 436 20559 9

Tim Parks’s latest novel opens in the forests of the South Tyrol, where a group of white-water enthusiasts are taking a kayaking holiday. The river is overflowing with melt water from a thawing glacier, and the kayakers find themselves endangered by the force of the current, as the river runs ever faster and fuller. It’s a symbolic river, too: Parks explores the ripples of minor social dramas experienced by a group of semi-strangers; the undercurrent of their memories, their past unhappinesses; and the crashing waves of environmental apocalypse.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

[*] His latest book, Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in 15th-century Florence (Profile, 288 pp., £15.99, May, 1 86197 791 3), an expansive history of Renaissance wheeling and dealing, sticks to Parks’s rules for non-fiction: unshowy erudition, relaxed courtesy.

Vol. 27 No. 9 · 5 May 2005 » Joanna Kavenna » Tight in the Cockpit (print version)
Page 32 | 2141 words