Journey into unknown territory
the David Park
Translated from English (Northern Ireland) by Cécile Arnaud
Quai Voltaire, 212 p., €20
When he drives off to pick up his sick son from his student residence, Tom twice fails to get started. The snow, which fell in abundance in the Belfast region where he lives and the north of England where his son Luke is, transforms the exit ramp from the family home into an ice rink.
On his first attempt, his car spins halfway up. “In the second, I almost reach the top, but the car suddenly turns sideways and slowly slides down the slope, facing an odd angle to the world. Everything is wrong, nothing is in the right place, and I am powerless to change its trajectory. » On the third try, the father of the family will go up the slope.
David Park, author of eleven books, had never been translated into French
Like this beginning strewn with pitfalls, Journey into unknown territory advances slowly, with a touching stubbornness, taking its rhythm, from the most trivial to the most intimate. At the start, it is only a question of clearing snow and loading the car. A thermos of coffee, medicine, blankets brought by Lorna, Tom’s wife, an Indian teepee added by their little girl Lilly, the CDs he chose for himself – Robert Wyatt, Van Morrison, REM, Nick Cave… –, and those that this caring father brings to Luke for the return trip, pile up in the passenger compartment. At the end of the expedition, a father will have faced an abyss of pain far more devastating than the worst rigors of cold and snow.
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Snowy road-movie, inner journey, pilgrimage of a bruised father towards his redemption, this Journey into unknown territory reveals to French readers a great Northern Irish novelist. David Park, author of eleven books, had never been translated into French. It is fortunate that his discreet work reaches us with this novel of infinite delicacy.
A round trip that the novelist has made several times with his own son
With empathy, the author takes his narrator through a region far from the tourist routes. Leaving Belfast, Tom takes the ferry to the north of England. He will cross it from West to East, along Hadrian’s Wall on the Scottish border, to pick up his son in Sunderland, an industrious port city near Newcastle. A round trip that the novelist has made several times with his own son. “On the road, we were talking. Football, music, nothing very personal or serious. But I felt like a father bringing his son home.”, confides David Park in a text on the genesis of his novel.
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His travel impressions are engraved in our memories with as much precision as the shots taken by Tom, a professional photographer accustomed to weddings, births and ceremonies. They come to life under his pen. Here, trucks ready to start prancing around in the hold of a ferry that has just docked. There, a kestrel hovering over snowy fields. All along the road, furtive sketched silhouettes, children sledding, hunters…
An unforgettable male voice
Each chance encounter allows confidences that we allow ourselves, or not, on the way, with strangers, from the brief exchange with an old lady loaded with errands until the moment suspended next to an accident victim of the road waiting rescue. Outlining his story in a modest voice, Tom confronts his happy and unhappy memories as so many clichés where the moment is forever inscribed. “After this moment the story can no longer be told otherwise, you will no longer be able to rearrange the images engraved in your memory, the outcome will always be the same. »
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While refining this portrait of a man gnawed by immense grief, David Park paints in small strokes an increasingly ample overall picture. With this ambitious novel with a refined count, the author makes an unforgettable male voice heard. Devoted and clumsy, loving and hurting, but no matter what, and even in the worst of winter, son, husband and father.
