The 'Dam Nation Game

As a former schoolteacher David Park is probably used to minor annoyances. When I accidentally knock a glass of water all over his pants and shoes, he is unfailingly kind about my clumsiness.

“Oh, you’re alright,” he says with a smile. “You’re okay.”
I’m not surprised then when he tells me that his former pupils often keep in touch to let him know how they’re faring. Park, a teacher for 34 years, began writing in his late 30s.
“I was a committed teacher,” he says. “You owe it to the students. I believed in it. I was always trying to clear a little space for writing, at the weekends or on holiday. Writing always came second.”
Readers will be glad he did make time. His latest novel, The Light Of Amsterdam, is a quietly powerful character-driven book. Written in graceful, elegant prose, the novel follows three people from Northern Ireland who head for Amsterdam on the same weekend and explores relationships and human failings.
“I think the book is about love,” Park reflects. “I’m particularly interested in the parent-child relationship and how a parent finds a means, a conduit, to give their love to a child even when the child doesn’t necessarily want it.”
The book examines two parent-child relationships. Circumstances force divorced father Alan to bring his emotionally withdrawn teenage son Jack to Amsterdam to see Bob Dylan in concert; and single mother Karen takes her first trip abroad for her daughter Shannon’s hen weekend. Park also looks at marriage and how infidelity – or the fear of it – can bring a relationship to a crisis point. Alan’s divorce is predicated on a single, unfulfilling moment of sexual infidelity. This is contrasted with Marion, who believes her husband Richard is planning to cheat.
“Marion is damaged by her deep personal insecurities. She desperately believes that he will be unfaithful to her and is waiting for that to happen, and that corrodes away at her. What she attempts to do in Amsterdam is make it happen within her frame of control and that’s a risky thing to do. In contrast, Alan’s infidelity has sent him spinning into a life he hasn’t anticipated. He’s afflicted by guilt and regret. He has to reshape and reform his life.”
An unusual choice for a male writer, two of the three main characters are female.
“I think it was a reaction against my last novel The Truth Commissioner – all the central characters were male. I wanted to redress that. Also I think the inner life of a woman is more interesting than that of a man. I just think women permit themselves access to a wider range of emotions than men sometimes do. As a writer I’m interested in the inner life and I wanted to explore the inner lives of these two different women.”
The inner life, with all its vulnerabilities, needs and desires is central to the novel. Alan, Marion and Karen have people that they care for, yet their inability to connect or communicate means that they are trapped in feelings of loneliness.
“The bottom line is that for a writer, happy people aren’t very interesting,” Park suggests. “The more insecurities, the more unhappiness that exists, the more material there is for a writer to explore. They are all seeking fulfilment, for that ultimately successful relationship, like all of us they are looking for love.”
Over the course of the weekend in Amsterdam, relationships are tested and changed in various ways. It seems as if getting away from their day-to-day lives allows the characters a chance to connect with others.
“There were two things. As a writer I felt claustrophobic in the context of Belfast and the north of Ireland. I wanted to write a book that was largely set somewhere else. Also it’s a cliché, but I think that often the sharpest perspective on our life is gained when we look at it from a different location. I liked the idea of the characters going some place new and having to reassess their lives.”
Amsterdam was chosen because of the writer’s own experience of the Dutch metropolis.
“When you’re a writer and you lead a quietly conventional life, you’re still desperately mining your own experiences for material. Amsterdam was the first European city I visited and stayed in as a teenager in the early ‘70s. It was such a perfect experience for me. I was coming from Belfast, which in the ‘70s was a bit of a nightmare. It was a place that shut itself down at 6pm and was split by sectarian division. When I went to Amsterdam in the summer, it seemed intensely beautiful. You have a history that is tangible and visible but it didn’t impose the same kind of sectarian divisions that you have in the North. I felt free and excited.”
In his love for the city, the writer and the character Alan align. Alan is saddened that Amsterdam is better known for its coffee shops and red-light district than for its art and culture.
“The stereotype of Amsterdam is that of a salacious, sleazy location and the city, and although it is extremely tolerant, it is actually quite a conservative place. It’s quite traditional. None of those stereotypical aspects of Amsterdam interested me very much. What the city gave me was enough. I just felt high on the beauty of the place.”

The Light Of Amsterdam is out now on Bloomsbury.