Finding one's rightful place in the solitude of the Alps

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RAPIDS

By Tim Parks

Arcade, $24, 246 pages

REVIEWED BY SUDIP BOSE

One winter afternoon more than a year ago, I went hiking with a friend. The air was cold, the woods were empty, and as we climbed a modest mountainside, our quiet conversation began to die away. For three hours, I was aware only of my surroundings: the stony trail, the leafless trees, the occasional deer, the striking views of the valley below.

During our descent, my friend's cell phone rang. He took the call and started to talk, and whatever mystery there had been in the woods -- in that cold wintry silence that I'd escaped the city to find -- was gone, replaced by the jarring noise of everyday life. Just then, another hiker approached us, bounding up the mountainside. As he passed, he glanced at my friend, still in the midst of conversation, shook his head disapprovingly, and said to me, "You just can't get away from it, can you."

I recalled this episode when reading Tim Parks' superb new novel, "Rapids," about a group of 11 English kayakers on a five-day paddling trip in the Italian Alps. Though the adventurers find themselves in a remote world of pristine beauty -- with "solid slopes rising steeply through gleaming meadow and dark pine," "barren walls of rock," and "patches of snow shining distantly to cap dizzying cliffs of dark stones" -- the trappings of modern life intrude nevertheless. Cell phone calls are made, text messages are sent, the nearest town's Internet cafe is visited. Indeed, the tension between the primitive and the modern is everywhere in Mr. Parks' novel: He seems to ask, Can we continue to explore the natural world, search out its mysteries, with cell phones in our pockets?

In several wonderful novels (such as "Destiny" and "Europa") as well as personal essays and an absolute classic work of nonfiction ("A Season With Verona," about hooliganism and Italian football), Mr. Parks has created one of the most literary and literate bodies of work of any writer today. But his books always entertain (a quality that should not be looked down upon); his writing gives tremendous pleasure.

Perhaps it is Mr. Parks' skill at manipulating suspense, at plunging the reader into a scene and pulling him quickly out, so that he is eager for another dip. Certainly the writer's staccato, almost breathless prose in "Rapids" is exhilarating to read, befitting a novel in which dangerous whitewater rapids figure so prominently.