Roger Brunyate's Reviews > The Light of Amsterdam

The Inner City

This book attracted me on a personal level, since it concerns a bunch of people from Belfast (my birthplace) flying for a weekend to Amsterdam, a city that is dear to my heart. In my day, about the only place you could fly to from Belfast was London, but in recent years easyJet has been offering cheap direct flights to several European cities, thus making them accessible to people who do not often travel. I doubt that David Park's novel will be adopted by the City of Amsterdam for publicity purposes any time soon, for the visitors' encounter with the town is at first a matter of fast food, cheap hotels, and non-stop drinking. But the city eventually works its magic, to produce moments of real beauty near the end.



A quote from The Guardian on the back of the book says "Park excels at examining the covert thought-processes of the secret self." Absolutely correct: this is an internal book, focusing on desires, excuses, and regrets much more than action or dialogue. The first hundred pages are heavy going, because all Park's travelers are unhappy people. We have Alan, a washed-up painter and art-school lecturer, lamenting his recent divorce brought about by a single act of his own stupidity; he has tickets to hear a farewell concert by Bob Dylan, but is squeezed into taking his disaffected sixteen-year-old son along with him. We have Karen, an unmarried mother who works as a cleaner in a retirement home, roped in to join her daughter's riotous hen party. And we have Marion, devastated by the confidence-sapping effects of menopause, and convinced that her husband of many years (and her partner in prosperous garden center) no longer loves her. It is not the physical cities of Belfast or Amsterdam that matter here (although Park gets the details very much right), but the cluttered inner city of these three people's minds, and whether the trip can open up new vistas and let in some light.



Shakespeare perfected a kind of comedy (for example in As You Like It or A Midsummer Night's Dream) in which characters escape some intolerable situation in the real world to enter some magic place in which everything gets sorted out. Park is clearly writing in the same tradition, but his proportions are different. It is a disadvantage, I think, that the magic takes so long to take hold, though each character will have at least one epiphany that is quietly moving. They will also begin to cross paths and tentatively reach out to one another. Park also differs from Shakespeare in avoiding neat happy endings, and in this I wholeheartedly applaud him. There is understanding there, acceptance, and even hope, but Park leaves us in no doubt that these are only the first steps in a longer journey. But it is a journey I would be interested in taking with them, much more than I ever thought when that plane took off for Amsterdam.