The Server by Tim Parks: review A Buddhist retreat hardly sounds like a promising setting for a novel. Vows of silence don't bode well for dialogue, while the claims of meditation to reach beyond selfhood are at odds with fiction's delight in snooping in the dark places of the mind. Stories are as welcome as shoes: you are supposed to leave both at the door. In practice, shedding your past is not as easy as kicking off a pair of sandals. That is certainly true for Beth Marriot, the unsettled narrator of Tim Parks's latest novel, who is nine months into her spiritual getaway at the Dasgupta Institute. She has absconded from a hedonistic world of booze, drugs and demo tapes, cutting ties with a brace of boyfriends (possessive band-mate Carl and Jonathan, a tubby painter old enough to be her father), a sometime girlfriend (band-mate Zoë) and her dejected parents. As is the wont of first-person narrators, she is holding something back: the details of the tragic skinny-dipping accident that initially prompted her flight to this New Age enclave in the shires. Beth claims to have achieved a kind of oblivious composure through Dasgupta meditation. She is content to rise in "lovely submission" to the gong, meditate for a couple of hours, then get on with chopping veg (she has long since graduated from ordinary student to voluntary "server"). But this claim is a contradiction: in picking up a pen, she is flouting the ban on writing, brandishing her ego so she feels "intensely Beth" once more. "Maybe I'm about to switch from being a model Dasgupta server," she warns, "to a crazy, bad-girl rebel breaking all the rules." For all that Beth is meant as a punky corrective to her frugal surroundings, her unruly behaviour turns out to be disappointingly predictable and attention-seeking. She threatens to snog another server and fantasises about running away with an older man after trespassing on his illicit diary (a sort of midlife crisis twin for her own). You can't help urging her to do something really naughty to give the whole book a satirical tweak: hide the gong, perhaps, or stir laxatives into the stew. But this novel's flaw is not so much its lukewarm plot as its largely uninspiring narration. The Server is Parks's fictional accompaniment to Teach Us To Sit Still, a recent memoir of his own spiky acquiescence to Vipassana meditation after years spent grappling a mystery illness. Parks's voice in that book was notable for its wry scepticism and rich intellectual curiosity. In denying Beth Marriot these qualities, his prose looks barren in comparison. Beth's style is simple and matter-of-fact, befitting a dashed-off journal. Parks has captured her mental muddle and half-digested Buddhism, but that doesn't make her psychological rummagings any more compelling: "If it was working I wouldn't be writing. I wouldn't be taking refuge in writing. I want to be in jhana. I wanted jhana to make me new. It hasn't. Only when she begins to slip into incantatory rhythms do we sense how the conflict between selflessness and egoism might be played out in her language: repetitions such as "texting texting texting" or "Jonathan Jothanan Thanajon" are caught between being knowingly parodic mantras and involuntary expressions of submission. The Dasgupta Institute itself is sharply observed, a surprisingly dystopian environment of gender segregation and enforced privation. But it's also grounds for hushed comedy, with its furtive flirtations and hierarchical peccadilloes. Every session, the students jostle for the best positions near the teacher, while Beth has to paste up the notice "ONLY ONE BANANA EACH." When the "Noble Silence" lifts on the final morning, it's "all of a sudden, yap yap yap yap yap." It's in these ironic details, rather than in the laboured contrast between Beth's routine and her writing, that The Server best explores the paradoxes and compromises of Western experiments with meditation. The Server by Tim Parks 288pp, Harvill Secker t £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £16.99, ebook £15.21)