Judge Savage

by Tim Parks

Now in paperback comes the gripping, suspenseful novel about Daniel Savage, a man who's lived a double life for far too long. Recently promoted to the position of Crown Court judge, Savage decides it's finally time to rededicate himself to his family, but a woman from his past who holds a secret the could ruin his marriage and career sends his existence into a mess of violence and confusion.

Genres: Fiction

456 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2004

About the author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.

Reviews

[Anni · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Road to Hell

In this chronicle of a man’s fall from grace, our eponymous protagonist is not so much a hapless victim of circumstance but his own worse enemy. As a non-white outsider in the justice system, he feels pressured by expectations, his promotion to the bench being seen as a case of positive discrimination. This pressure and his guilt over past indiscretions help to send him on a self-destructive path to ruin.
Parks convincingly depicts the conflict of setting a moral compass in private life and public domain when, like Caesar’s wife, a Judge must be seen to be above suspicion.
I would have given this 4 stars but the lack of quotation marks, plus a convoluted narrative style switching between interior monologue and free indirect speech, makes for a challenging and often confusing read.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

My 4th Parks, and I think I start to know his system: take a troubled main character, let him (for it is always a man) end up in a complex situation especially in his love life, and show how he gets more and more into trouble; describe all this as if you’re in the head of the character, with constantly intersecting and thus very chaotic observations and reflections. It goes without saying that this system really digs deep into the human psyche, and especially exposes how shaky and vulnerable our existence is.

In this novel, Daniel Savage has just been promoted a judge at one of the highest legal authorities in the UK and feels at the top of his existence: he exudes natural authority, can distinguish flawlessly right from wrong in legal matters and because he is the first coloured man in the judiciary, he seems to have reached a position of immunity. But that state of grace immediately is undermined because Savage is haunted by his aldulterous life (his already battered marriage is shattered by his many former sweet hearts), and his relative self-confidence makes him constantly say and do things he should better not. Some dramatic events make things go from bad to worse for him, but unlike in the previous Parks novels 'Europe' and 'Destiny' it does not end on a positive note. On the contrary, the outcome of the story is a bit awkward and ultimately remains open. And another difference: Parks records the events not from Savage's own head, but as a third narrator. And that makes the reading certainly not easier: the sentences are jumping in all directions, each related to a different aspect of Savage's life. Parks also devotes considerable attention to the different juridical cases Savage presides over in court, sometimes with so many details that the thread is lost. The Parks system here has reached its limits.

Yet with 'Judge Savage" Parks once again has written a clever and elaborate novel, which ingeniously combines very diverse themes such as guilt and personal responsibility, the shakiness of our existence, the difference between appearance and reality, and the increasing inability to really judge things. It still is nice to stroll through Parks’ world, even though this is not his best work.

[Ann Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel began well. A newly-elevated judge has just purchased a country house with his estranged wife to try and make up for his straying with numerous women (only one of which she concretely knows about). Yet one of his former flings keeps contacting him, claiming to be in danger. Then he proceeds to do innumerable stupid things that predictably result in the end of his marriage and possibly his suicide. Also he presides over some complicated cases. I love this author's style and the novel begins promisingly. But it bogs down in details and malaise halfway through and never recovers. The judge's interior monologues become tiresome and repetitive. It's a novel that won't commit to the necessity of imposing narrative structure on imagined experience that successful novels require.

[Beth · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author drew me in with an immediate feeling that something bad was about to happen. But it took way too long to reach the point. By the time I was getting close to the mystery the protagonist had become so annoying that anything could have happened to him and it wouldn't have bothered me.

Why does someone want to read about a character that generally deserves anything negative that happens to him? And more, why would you want to write about it?

The pace is too slow, the plot is not particularly interesting and the other characters are caricatures.

[Jerry van Beers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rechter Savage werkt zichzelf in de problemen door de vrouwen waarmee hij zijn echtgenote bedriegt, en daarmee ook zijn vrienden en kinderen.
Mooi boek, waarin rechtszaken aan de perikelen van de rechter verbonden zijn, soms in een zin, maar altijd met een naadloze overgang.

[Ria Mulschlegel]

Niet uitgelezen

[Rosanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, dense, well-written, dark.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Told with lawyerly precision, this was gripping in just the sort of way the cover leads to suggest. What the artistic teaser misses out is the far from smooth or straightforward legal chicaneries that make this book so interesting, far beyond hack crime writing.

Judge Savage is a classic narcissist, who quite frankly deserves the book throwing at him. I won't spoil what happens, but suffice to say that as readers we spend our time largely in his thoughts, which are rarely limited to the facts of the cases before him. Parks likes to write about sex, death and the worst of human behaviour and perhaps unsurprisingly given the courtroom setting, we get plenty of all three. It's the implication of the judge himself into some of this unsavoury action that forms the basis for the book.

Parks's novels from the late 1990s and 2000s have generally been a hit for me, and this was no exception. If I was judging Savage, it would indeed be a savage judgement. If I'm judging the book, well m'lud, it's more than fair, cop.

[Jan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a gift from a friend, not paperback, hard copy.

Story.
Privileged adopted child, becomes a prominent Judge. He is black, his adopted brother is white. Their relationship has never been good. Judge Savage has been blessed with a good career, moving up the ranks fast, with help from friends. He has the trophy wife and family and is building a new home. However, not all is good on the home front. This pillar of the community is not squeaky clean! In fact, he is a cheating husband. Not once, not twice, but constantly having affairs, his world is about to come tumbling down. Instead of getting on the right path, he digs deeper and starts visiting prostitutes.

He looses his family, he reunites with a brother, he finds his best friend and wife, have been back stubbing him, but what can he expect, when he lusted over his friends wife, and there is a murder, and a body missing. The book ends with the reader none the wiser on the Judges fate, except he is going to continuously spiral down.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read and enjoyed Tim Parks' non-fiction, particularly his excellent book about football fans in Verona, but this is the first of his novels I have read.
After 100 pages I was so fed up with the writing style that I almost broke my untreatable rule of finishing every book I start. The style was a mixture of stream of consciousness and the rambling of an untidy mind and quite hard to follow.
Still, I persisted, and the rest of the book had some interesting thoughts on the justice system in the UK as the lead character, a judge, became more and more enmeshed in a spider's web essentially of his own weaving.
I think I may stick to Tim Parks non-fiction in future.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel opens with the sentence “There is no life without a double life ...” I don’t necessarily agree but this certainly applies to a number of characters in Park’s book. Dan Savage is a black British man – ironically adopted into the English upper middle class by a Colonel Savage. He is a man who wants above all to fit in, to be seen as a just and fair man and lawyer but he has a fatal flaw – he is an inveterate womaniser. This is a story about justice, about marriage and about friendship. Although overlong, I enjoyed it very much. Three and a half stars.

[Anton Segers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Passionerende lectuur.
Tim Parks is een one trick pony, hij kan maar één ding, en dat kan hij heel goed: een protagonist in crisis tonen, al de gedachten die door zijn hoofd tuimelen, de wirwar van emoties, schuldgevoelens, dromen en angsten die in zijn hoofd tegen mekaar vechten.
Hij sleept je mee dat hoofd in, onweerstaanbaar. Het hoofd van een rechter die zijn greep verliest over zijn moreel kompas, zijn familie, zijn leven, alles.

[Siobhan Markwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This white man writes a black doesn't read well twenty years after publication. Some interesting reflections on legal tangles but nothing else to recommend. I'd you want to read Parks,bread Europa. Enough said.

[Freek Dech · Rating 3 out of 5]

Successful, adulterous, colored judge sinks ever deeper in personal problems ending up loosing his family, but finds that society will not let him fall.

[Biogeek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly I just like Parks' loopy writing style. Just get lost in the sentences.

[Ted]

Richard Dodds rec

[Ann]

Stopped reading after asking myself if I was really interested in the problems of judge Savage after an adulterious life.
Guess what the answer was....

It's a pity because I normally love Tim Parks' books.