Three months after returning to England, Christopher Burton, while standing at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel, receives the phone-call that informs him of his son's suicide.
Thus the opening of Tim Parks' latest novel. But why, on receiving this terrible news, does Christopher Burton immediately decide that he must leave his Italian wife of almost thirty years? Why does he find it so difficult to focus on his grief for his son? Burton feels his pious, raffish and mercurial wife gave him his life in Italy and his career as the foremost journalist on Italian affairs. But surely she is also the person who has made life impossible for him. Was their son somehow a victim of their explosive love and hate? Or is that thought simply the expression of a deep paranoia?
Intensely dramatic, dark and, against all the odds, hilariously funny, 'Destiny' is at once an entirely satisfying story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity, on those dynamics that in forging one character may destroy another. Above all, in its presentation of a mind fizzling with contradictions, at once romantic and callous, brilliant and blind, Parks gives us a frightening experience of what it means to tread the narrow line between sanity and psychosis.
