The title of Tim Parks’s 17th novel is false advertising, because Thomas and Mary: A Love Story is barely a love story, and it’s certainly not about Mary. The intended effect is irony: the dust jacket promises ‘a love story in reverse’, and the opening chapter describes Thomas Paige losing his wedding ring on Blackpool beach during a family holiday.
The next few chapters are reasonably successful. Parks opens little windows on to the Paiges’ dying marriage. ‘Bedtimes’ takes us through a week of evenings, with the Paiges always going to bed at different times. ‘Goat’ explains the nicknames they’ve had for one another over the years, ending with a painful scene in which Thomas asks Mary to stop calling him ‘Goat’.
‘It was our story,’ he accepted. ‘It was fun once. But not now. I’m Thomas and you’re Mary.’
Lists are used frequently, sometimes to good effect — although never so brilliantly as Kundera’s ‘Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words’ in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a superior forebear of Parks’s fragmentary technique.
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