Muddying the waters

This fitfully involving, but for the most part irritating, melodrama is Tim Parks’s 14th novel, and not one of his best. Set almost entirely in India, it begins with the funeral of one Albert James, a trailblazing anthropologist whose elliptical, wide-ranging theories never really took root, and it ends with the death of his widow, Helen, an aid worker, some months later.

Parks concerns himself with the interior lives of his characters as they negotiate grief and curiosity about the dead man’s unfinished research (Parks admits in a note that James was loosely inspired by the social scientist Gregory Bateson). But none of them ever quite comes into focus — including the main character, John.

John is the son of Albert and Helen (although what would a melodrama be without some doubt cast on a character’s biological parentage?). Still in his early twenties, he arrives in India hoping to see his father’s body before the cremation.