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But that’s just Daniel’s professional programme. The novel bristles with other dramas. Here are a few, not necessarily in chronological order: Sarah fails her A- levels by writing obscene answers and leaves home in a rage against her parents. Martin descends into depression, physical sickness, hospital, death. Daniel gives the funeral oration. Hilary discovers more infidelities and leaves him again, taking Tom with her. Christine tries harder but unsuccessfully to seduce him. She turns out to be a virgin. No wonder: she and Daniel discover Martin’s photograph collection of paedo-pics. Daniel consoles himself with a prostitute and a crown prosecution solicitor. There are money problems about the new house. He moves in with his facetious, dZclassZ brother, Frank, who runs an antiques stall with his gay partner.
All this is interwoven with the main plot. Seven years earlier, Daniel had seduced a young Korean girl called Minnie. Her parents forced her to marry another Korean, and she hasn’t seen Daniel since. Suddenly, she starts telephoning him for help. He meets her in a cafZ. On the way home he is mugged from behind: he doesn’t get to see his attackers. After several operations and blind in one eye, he emerges from hospital as a national hero: the attack is seen as racialist, and he is awarded the MBE (rather a humble honour for a judge). He turns it down anyway, afraid that his sexual misdemeanours will be dug up by the tabloids, especially when Minnie arrives in his hotel (Frank got tired of sheltering him). She is pregnant and badly beaten up and dies on his bed. Still, he is already resigned to losing his job. His life is falling apart: his career is on the point of collapse, his wife and children have left him.
Then everything comes right through the machinations of a friendly police chief whom he has always regarded as hostile. Plus Sarah has returned home, and Hilary wants him back too. He doesn’t seem pleased, though, with this startling and gratifying (you’d think) denouement. ‘Everything has been removed from me,’ he complains in the last paragraph. He has lost control of his life – and readers might feel they’ve lost the plot.
It doesn’t matter that much. The novel is still a virtuoso piece, a tour de force, highly enjoyable because the characters are so alive, often so funny (as convincing as the story is not), the milieus so vivid, the hero so attractive, and so good at analysing his own and other people’s feelings and motives. Besides, it is a p.c. novel (about racism especially) that pokes fun at p.c.-ness. Just like the hero of Parks’s earlier novel Europa, who campaigned against clichZ, Daniel defines and demolishes kitsch. ‘This hymn’, he thinks at Martin’s funeral, ‘is purest kitsch. We wrap ourselves in purest kitsch
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