The Beginning Of The End
by Ian Parkinson
Salt Publishing
Wow. Roll on 1 June,
2015! Is there a treat waiting for
you? ‘The Beginning of the End’ by Ian Parkinson will be published and an
extraordinary new novelist will make his debut.
BLURB:
‘Visiting Thailand to marry a sex worker,
Raymond is informed that his father’s body has been discovered in an isolated
villa on the Belgian coast. While his bride embarks on a career in the Dutch
and German porn industries, Raymond moves into the villa with the intention of
renovating the property. Life by the sea, however, does not go according to
plan.’
REVIEW:
Raymond is in his
thirties, a divorcee, a loner, a weird loner, who designs doorbells and washing
machines. He gets on with his job but not with his colleagues. He has been employed for nearly fifteen
years, yet has been denied promotion several times. He had dreams of being one
of history’s elite designers but it was never going to happen, so his ambitions
fade as he becomes more disheartened and downbeat. He likes porn. He likes sex, aggressive, explicit sex and eventually
fulfils a notion to travel to Thailand to meet a sex worker, Joy, who becomes
his wife, not out of any deep love between the two of them but mainly as a visa
arrangement for her. The marriage
lifts his spirits a little until he receives news that his father’s body has
been found in a remote villa on the Belgian coast.
Raymond and Joy head
for Belgium. Joy finds employment in the porn film business and Raymond mooches
about the dilapidated villa wondering what to do with it. He plans to refurbish
it over time but cannot always find the motivation or energy to put his heart
and soul into the project. He spends a lot of time in bed, when his wife is
away working. He eats microwaved ready meals. He watches television and
pornography on his computer. He is a regular visitor to a massage parlour. He
becomes a little obsessed with watching the developments of a bonsai tree. He drinks and takes pills. He smokes
like a chimney. But his chosen, dull and dingy existence is shaken when the
plot takes a tragic twist.
The second half of the
book made me think of a journey along the M1, where the M stands for madness.
Along the way there are lay-bys and slip roads of clear thinking, moments of
sanity, sanctuary from swirling thoughts in a mixed-up head and, occasionally, through
darkness, pinpoints of light suggesting that even in hopelessness, hope
struggles to be seen and heard.
Raymond on many levels
is a horrible person but Ian Parkinson pulls off an amazing writer’s trick of
making readers – well, this one anyway – feel a fondness and sympathy for him
that he doesn’t always deserve.
This is a weird,
wonderful, troubling concoction of a novel that is utterly compelling. It is hard not to fall on the old
page-turner cliché but you really do want to know what happens next and where
the story is going. Sometimes it requires the broadest of broad minds. It is an
excellent piece of work and I recommend it for originality and freshness and
for Ian Parkinson’s talent for making disturbing material so enjoyable.
