Thirty years ago, Tim Parks moved from London to Italy. As a writer until recently mired in the midlist, he admitted that he didn¡¯t want to watch ¡°the rise of the Amises and McEwans¡± in more detail than strictly necessary. He has written 15 novels, but his breakthrough came with a nonfiction work, ¡°Teach Us To Sit Still,¡± in which he bemoaned, among other stress-making bedevilments, his compulsion to narrate. But that compulsion produced voluminous notes chronicling his travails on Italian railways, so ¡°Italian Ways¡± takes its place among Parks¡¯ warts-and-all snapshots of the country.
Railways were important in the unification of Italy, an effort still ongoing in this nation of city states. So the new generation of high-speed trains is advertised as being ¡°for a more united Italy.¡± Tickets, at least on the slower trains, are supplied cheap as a social service. Railways are also embedded in the national psyche in that Italians are big commuters: they like to stay where they were born, and will commute rather than up sticks. Superficially then, the railway is a benign force in Italy. But the trains are in essence government-run, and Parks presents Italy as a country in which life is an endless series of tussles with the begrudged incubus of the state. As a lover of trains and a commuter between Milan and Verona, Parks finds himself a regular combatant.
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