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When I Stopped Thinking, I Wrote Illness out of My Life

The debilitating pain that struck Tim Parks baffled doctors. But the curve lay in switching off the mind, the novelist tells Gils Hatterley.

1.Tim Parks appeared to have spent most of his life trying to perfect his brain and then show off the results.More than 20 books -- and there literary prizes -- later, he clearly had everything sussed. There was an apparently stable marriage, children and a career that afforded him enough fame to feel loved but not so much as to be a hindrance. He even lived in Verona, for crying out loud: he taught literary translation (in Italian) at university in Milan and enjoyed peerless Italian wines and sunsets.

2.His midlife crisis, when it came, was wholly unexpected. And all the more so for being nothing to do with the usual suspects.He didn't have an affair. He didn't care about the changing texture of his skin. He didn't even have writer's block. No, by 2005, this most cerebral of novelists had developed a mysterious physical pain. Quickly, it grew into a whole repertoire of pains: there was, he says, “a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis itself.”

3.He felt so bad that he was almost shocked into silence. “I lay there rigid and angry”he wrote later, after having to leave his own New Year’s Eve party early. “I was furious with life for dealing me this card. My body Perhaps I am a parasite in my own flesh, I thought; and now the landlord has had enough.” Did he have cancer? As many of his woes centered on his turbulent peeing schedule, the doctors naturally cried “prostate!”. He went through the usual battery of tests and was offered drugs and eventually an operation -- but he resisted.

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