One of the two epigraphs to David Park’s 12th novel is taken from Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader: “The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as a matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.”
For Park, memory has always been an unfinished business, time endlessly looping back on itself to unsettle the present and trouble the future. In Ghost Wedding, Park narrates the stories of two couples a century apart whose lives are linked to an artificial lake on the grounds of a big house known as the Manor House.
George Allenby, a first World War veteran, is tasked with constructing the lake and drawing up plans for a boat house on its banks. One hundred years later, Alex and Ellie opt for the lakeside boat house as their wedding venue. Both George and Alex are tormented by secrets that haunt their current lives and which, in all their awfulness, resist the ready redemption of confession.
George, who forms a romantic relationship with Cora (one of the housemaids in the Manor House), struggles with the inevitable moral compromises of warfare and the equally treacherous fault lines of class presumption and emotional betrayal. Alex, the son of a venal and domineering Belfast property developer, constantly doubts his own capacity to act and feels deeply shamed by past failings and a recurrent sense of moral indecisiveness.
Alex’s imminent marriage to Ellie brings with it inevitable reckonings just as the future of George’s relationship with Cora involves its own dark appraisals.
Park’s prose, shuttling across the years, summons into being the distant voices and still lives of an Ulster – both urban and rural – that has been frozen in sepia tones. Among the most affecting pages in this compelling novel are those where the experiences of others bleed into the present.
The proposed sale of three medals in the auction rooms owned by Ellie’s father prompts the appearance of a sailor reliving the terrors of naval combat in the second World War. Alex’s visit to a disused tea merchant’s building in Belfast segues into an extended sequence on the furtive intricacies of office romances in an earlier time.
Park is clearly fascinated by the malleability of time, the past that is never truly past, the present which is endlessly teased by the future. In a passage towards the end of Ghost Wedding, the narrator notes: “Time shuffles itself lightly like a pack of cards. Who can tell what sequence it will deal? Who can tell what will fall across future days?”
Park, too, shuffles his own cards lightly, and part of his gift is moral latitude, letting the reader decide what to make of the different outcomes, leaving storylines open so that future days are not all spoken for in advance.
A recurrent feature of Park’s writing is a flawless ear for the push and pull of dialogue. The scene where the parents of the newly-weds-to-be meet over a dinner is a masterpiece of purposeful joshing. Park also shows remarkable economy in damning out of his own mouth the feckless son of the Manor House – Eddie Remington – in his revealing exchanges with George.
Although Park resists showiness, he brings a distinctive grace to sentences which make a virtue of restraint: “They stand at the lake’s edge as if mesmerised by the water’s flow, before vanishing again like some early morning mist sifting through the trees.”
There is a toughness in Park’s depiction of the callous indifference of the wealthy as they sacrifice workers’ safety to the indulgence of landscape follies, or when property developers are shown to strategically vandalise cities in pursuit of carefully calculated gains.
In Ghost Wedding, the failings are never just individual; they are also collective and they thread their way over time through the lives of communities. The reader sees a recurring theme of public goods being captured by private interests.
The second epigraph to Park’s arresting new novel is taken from the Gospel according to St Luke. The subject is wedding guests. That nightmare of any couple about to tie the knot: who (not) to invite? Luke is clear. Forget family and friends: “when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind”.
And Ghost Wedding ends with the three-page “Invitation” where Park announces that the “tale is told and I prepare a table in the heart’s imagination”. Those who are specifically named in the “Invitation” are Luke’s congregation – the neglected, the lonely, the despised, the silenced – who have peopled Park’s imagination over the course of his writing career and who, in this latest novel, are richly received at the heartfelt table of his own imagination.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
