In Tim Parks’s essay Why Finish Books? he admits to abandoning reading novels halfway through, eager to start something new. “Might it be,” he asks, “that, in showing a willingness not to pursue even an excellent book to the death, you are actually doing the writer a favour, exonerating him or her from the near-impossible task of getting out of the plot gracefully?”
It’s tempting to obey this impulse reading Parks’s new novel, the story of 75-year-old Frank Marriot’s incarceration in a Milan hotel as Covid sends Italy into its first lockdown. Though the prose is as smooth as the cabernet Frank sips, dining alone while the world disintegrates around him, one can’t see how the dramatic situation can be resolved without resorting to inelegant contrivances or a crashing deus ex machina. After all, when it comes to Covid, one has the benefit of three harrowing years of hindsight.
