Judge Savage by Tim Parks

Court in the act

During the past 50 years white British writers have been notable for their avoidance of protagonists from the ethnic minorities. So Tim Parks's novel, featuring a black protagonist in the cultural battlefields of inner city and housing-estate Britain, should be something of an occasion.

At the outset Daniel Savage has been appointed the first black Crown Court judge on the local circuit. He purchases a new house, and everything seems set fair for the future. But everything goes downhill from there. The judge's cases are difficult and complex, one of them sparks a race riot, and he finds himself increasingly confused by the confluences of class, race and sex which invade his personal life. The plot is complicated by a style in which information is withheld until you forget the point, then inserted pages later in the middle of some complex reflection. It's not an easy read, but there's worse to come.

The novel offers itself up as a portrait of contemporary Britain, but even before you open it the cover gives you the first hint about its carelessness. The jacket shows the lined and sagging face of an elderly black man with pronounced African features above the title, Judge Savage. (Geddit?). But in the text we're told that Savage is in youthful middle age, and only barely identifiable as "black".

The disjunction, like the cheap irony of the title, seems trivial at first but as you read on the jarring notes build into an overwhelming distraction.

Take the language. Public and private idioms seem the same so the characters all sound as if they're addressing a courtroom all of the time. There's a pervasive uncertainty about routine slang – "you shag the chinky ticket" – "sack artist" – "a bit queer" (meaning "weird") – as well as about the difference between English and American idioms. The author seems to be trying to cover his shaky grasp of the landscape by making the town in which Judge Savage lives anonymous, but it's hard to think of a British town with a sizable "Korean community" and groups of lurking "Hispanic men". (These are, of course, the local pimps.)

The details add up to someone with a tin ear, and a deep ignorance about his chosen landscape. The black protagonist, of Brazilian parentage, has been adopted by a white family and educated at Rugby. So we are offered practically nothing about his relationship to his own identity, except that he is painfully self-conscious about his colour. During the entire 444 pages the judge has no thoughts about his background, apart from a few lines about his mum. He has no black friends or associates, and no insight into the situation of other black people. His self-awareness is determined by the racist commentaries of his family, friends and colleagues.

Their remarks are grindingly banal, a mixture of wine bar wit and Sun-reader dogma. We are told that the government, in a fever of political correctness, has plucked Savage from obscurity to make him a judge in advance of his seniority because he is "black" but not "that black". "They chose the only one of us who really is one of us, but with boot polish on his face," his friend comments.

This is as deep as the author's insight on the topic goes. In real life black people who reach Savage's level in public service will have been through a long and testing apprenticeship. By the time such people reach the glass ceiling they tend to be tough and a great deal nastier than the hapless victim of his own inadequacy that Savage becomes.

This novel is a notable disappointment, if only because Parks's unease with contemporary Britain is characteristic of Englit's current inability to penetrate the currents of demographic and cultural change in British and European cities. It's all a bit queer, I would say, if not downright bloody weird.

Mike Phillips's latest novel is 'A Shadow of Myself' (HarperCollins)