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The Canal
An electrifying debut novel that becomes a shocking tale about... boredom
In a deeply compelling debut novel, Lee Rourke—a British underground sensation for his story collection Everyday —tells the tale of a man who finds his life so boring it frightens him. So he quits his job to spend some time sitting on a bench beside a quiet canal in a placid London neighborhood, watching the swans in the water and the people in the glass-fronted offices across the way while he collects himself.
However his solace is soon interupted when a jittery young woman begins to show up and sit beside him every day. Although she won't even tell him her name, she slowly begins to tell him a chilling story about a terrible act she committed, something for which she just can't forgive herself—and which seems to have involved one of the men they can see working in the building across the canal.
Torn by fear and pity, the man becomes more immersed in her tale, and finds that boredom has, indeed, brought him to the most terrifying place he's ever been.
In a deeply compelling debut novel, Lee Rourke—a British underground sensation for his story collection Everyday —tells the tale of a man who finds his life so boring it frightens him. So he quits his job to spend some time sitting on a bench beside a quiet canal in a placid London neighborhood, watching the swans in the water and the people in the glass-fronted offices across the way while he collects himself.
However his solace is soon interupted when a jittery young woman begins to show up and sit beside him every day. Although she won't even tell him her name, she slowly begins to tell him a chilling story about a terrible act she committed, something for which she just can't forgive herself—and which seems to have involved one of the men they can see working in the building across the canal.
Torn by fear and pity, the man becomes more immersed in her tale, and finds that boredom has, indeed, brought him to the most terrifying place he's ever been.
199 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
11 people are currently reading
329 people want to read
About the author
Lee Rourke
13 books57 followersLee Rourke is the author of the short-story collection Everyday, the novels The Canal (winner of the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize 2010), Vulgar Things, and the poetry collections Varroa Destructor and Vantablack. His latest novel Glitch is published by Dead Ink Books. His debut novel The Canal is being adapted to film by Storyhouse Productions, summer 2020. He is Contributing Editor for 3:AM Magazine [www.3ammagazine.com]. He lives by the sea.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
November 28, 2015
Raw and bleak but beautifully so. Sad and quiet mixed with a jolt or two of random violence. To me it sort of felt like a mix of The Stranger and Concrete Island or Crash, but told from the unique POV of a post-9/11 post-London Bombings male millennial Londoner.
April 8, 2011
"How are you going to write this review, Brad?"
"I dunno, Brad. This is going to be seriously tough."
"You liked it, though. You liked it a lot, so just write what you feel."
"I liked parts of it a lot, loved parts of it, but it is so fucking depressing."
"Depressing is good!"
"Depressing can be good, but it isn't entertaining. I can't see myself coming back to this book anytime soon."
"Still, you loved the characters ..."
"Yeah. The narrator was good, but I really loved the woman, and that whole bit about wanting the son of the man she killed to recognize her. Amazing stuff." "Right. So what's the problem. You loved this book."
"I loved the writing. I loved the dialogue. But ..."
"..."
"What?!"
"But what?"
"I dunno. It all comes back to how depressing it is."
"But it's supposed to be depressing. It's catalyzed by boredom; it's a meditation on how to really live and be alive; it's full of cruelty and kindness and feeling; it's life."
"Yeah, and life sucks."
"Life doesn't suck and you know it."
"I know, but the way we live sucks. The way we don't live."
"But this story, these two people, they lived in their own ways. They took paths of their own choosing, embraced them and lived them. Surely that's worth five stars."
"It is. And so is the writing. But the way I feel now, afterwards, undermines that. I honour this book, but I can't love it."
"You're an ass."
"Just so."
"I dunno, Brad. This is going to be seriously tough."
"You liked it, though. You liked it a lot, so just write what you feel."
"I liked parts of it a lot, loved parts of it, but it is so fucking depressing."
"Depressing is good!"
"Depressing can be good, but it isn't entertaining. I can't see myself coming back to this book anytime soon."
"Still, you loved the characters ..."
"Yeah. The narrator was good, but I really loved the woman, and that whole bit about wanting the son of the man she killed to recognize her. Amazing stuff." "Right. So what's the problem. You loved this book."
"I loved the writing. I loved the dialogue. But ..."
"..."
"What?!"
"But what?"
"I dunno. It all comes back to how depressing it is."
"But it's supposed to be depressing. It's catalyzed by boredom; it's a meditation on how to really live and be alive; it's full of cruelty and kindness and feeling; it's life."
"Yeah, and life sucks."
"Life doesn't suck and you know it."
"I know, but the way we live sucks. The way we don't live."
"But this story, these two people, they lived in their own ways. They took paths of their own choosing, embraced them and lived them. Surely that's worth five stars."
"It is. And so is the writing. But the way I feel now, afterwards, undermines that. I honour this book, but I can't love it."
"You're an ass."
"Just so."
December 6, 2014
Lee Rourke's use of repetition here is truly remarkable and at times poetic: the canal itself; the swans; the helicopters; the teenage gang; the office building—the way that he handles each of these images as they grow gradually more complex and intertwined throughout the novel allow the reader to see a governing structural shift from the narrator's passive relation to the outside world to a much more active one.
The Canal is a novel about boredom, and yet it is far from boring. In many ways, this is a chamber drama, and Rourke handles the claustrophobic narrative skillfully and even cinematically—all the more so as this is his first novel, meaning we have major talent on our hands here. The way that boredom is intertwined with so many things—love, terrorism, confession, violence—and is also the root cause of these things is explored with a deft eye toward social critique as well as an unrelenting view of how these external forces shape our own inner psychological states. The Canal is also very much concerned with how isolated modern life causes us to feel, how fractured and fragmented we all are, how subservient to technology and machines, and how this prevents us from forging deeper emotional bonds with others.
The Canal is a novel about boredom, and yet it is far from boring. In many ways, this is a chamber drama, and Rourke handles the claustrophobic narrative skillfully and even cinematically—all the more so as this is his first novel, meaning we have major talent on our hands here. The way that boredom is intertwined with so many things—love, terrorism, confession, violence—and is also the root cause of these things is explored with a deft eye toward social critique as well as an unrelenting view of how these external forces shape our own inner psychological states. The Canal is also very much concerned with how isolated modern life causes us to feel, how fractured and fragmented we all are, how subservient to technology and machines, and how this prevents us from forging deeper emotional bonds with others.
July 20, 2018
Books (and films) about boredom tend to be boring, but this bucks the trend. A man bored of his job hands in his resignation to go sit on the same bench by the banks of a canal running through North London. Contemplating the litter and graffiti, the bird life, the airplanes overhead and the windowed office block with all the wage slaves inside. He credits that work and play are just time filling activities to persuade us that we are active and therefor not bored; he has seen through this and would rather own the shape of his boredom. Two sections are called 'Weight' & 'Gravity' and it seems these twin tyrants are what he would like to defy, not to be able just to float off somewhere, but to not bear any substance on earth at all, which would equate more honestly to the lack of substance he feels about life's emptiness.
But it's when a strange, beautiful woman comes to sit down on the bench (after a couple of teasing false starts with tramps and the mentally impaired), that the novel surges ahead. She has all the power here, what they can and can't talk about, what her mysterious secret is. He of course falls in love to some degree, though falling in love is as much a waste of time as any other human activity. (There is a scene in a café in which the woman rounds on a man from the office they sit opposite to, and we the reader assumes he is an old love, but Rourke is skilful enough to provide a far darker and more profound reason behind the contretemps than a mere failed relationship).
The woman reveals a disturbing but tantalisingly fascinating philosophy to her boredom, in that she has a psychic bond to suicide bombers and terrorists because she know they act out of boredom in their lives, the ultimate in both thrill seeking and self-negation. This is a shape of boredom very different from the man she sits next to. I can't go into further detail as it would contain spoilers, but suffice it to say I found her far more intriguing than him.
The reason I gave it 4 stars was because I guessed well ahead of time the fate of an important symbol they saw in their daily canalside contemplations, but also because all the aside flashbacks of the man seemed to dovetail precisely into his experiences with the woman in the now, which I thought a bit too neat and coincidental. But a really good, surprising read on a subject I normally find, well, boring.
The character's 'quest' for penetrating boredom reminded me of Tom Mccarthy's "Remainder" in that steely, quiet mania to try and reach an understanding of something right at the centre of your mental make up.
But it's when a strange, beautiful woman comes to sit down on the bench (after a couple of teasing false starts with tramps and the mentally impaired), that the novel surges ahead. She has all the power here, what they can and can't talk about, what her mysterious secret is. He of course falls in love to some degree, though falling in love is as much a waste of time as any other human activity. (There is a scene in a café in which the woman rounds on a man from the office they sit opposite to, and we the reader assumes he is an old love, but Rourke is skilful enough to provide a far darker and more profound reason behind the contretemps than a mere failed relationship).
The woman reveals a disturbing but tantalisingly fascinating philosophy to her boredom, in that she has a psychic bond to suicide bombers and terrorists because she know they act out of boredom in their lives, the ultimate in both thrill seeking and self-negation. This is a shape of boredom very different from the man she sits next to. I can't go into further detail as it would contain spoilers, but suffice it to say I found her far more intriguing than him.
The reason I gave it 4 stars was because I guessed well ahead of time the fate of an important symbol they saw in their daily canalside contemplations, but also because all the aside flashbacks of the man seemed to dovetail precisely into his experiences with the woman in the now, which I thought a bit too neat and coincidental. But a really good, surprising read on a subject I normally find, well, boring.
The character's 'quest' for penetrating boredom reminded me of Tom Mccarthy's "Remainder" in that steely, quiet mania to try and reach an understanding of something right at the centre of your mental make up.
January 26, 2011
“I’m not asking you to understand. I’m asking you to listen.” – Thoughts on The Canal by Lee Rourke
First off, a story (of sorts) – here is how I ended up reading this book:
And that was that.
A person needs three things when reading Lee Rourke’s The Canal: patience, patience, and more patience. But don’t get me wrong – I didn’t enumerate patience three times to emphasize a great deal needed for this book. Rather, different things call for different kinds of patience, and so you need three versions of it for three things: patience for the story, patience for the (unnamed) narrator, and patience for the shifting fascinations on things, namely on ducks, gravity, and airplanes.
Am I making sense here? Not really, no? Here, let me try again.
I’m the kind of person who stubbornly reads through a book no matter what. Sometimes I put them down for a time – a day or two, a week, a month, until I run out of other books to read and I have no other choice – but for as long as I’ve started reading them, I have a need to finish them. Fortunately, The Canal didn’t need to be put down out of boredom – on the contrary, I had to stop reading to prolong the agony before the last chapter, something I did not expect to be doing when I started reading. Which is why, dear readers, it is a book that should not – I repeat, not – be judged by its first 50 pages.
The narrator – nameless, faceless, jobless even – is probably the most bored person I’ve read of. He reminds me of that dude from Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero , except that this narrator isn’t filthy rich nor young (nor with an identity, even). Our narrator, however, has a lush vocabulary. Some examples:
So to say that the narration is lifeless and boring is just plain wrong – nobody uses miasma in everyday sentence, let alone on everyday thought. The upside to our male narrator is an equally nameless, albeit more mysterious, female subject – who is harboring a secret. On page 51.
Told you not to judge by its first 50 pages.
This secret is the thing that bonds these two strangers – she talks, he listens. “Bored people will listen to just about anything,” she said, and so he is consumed by her confidences, to the point that he obsesses over her identity – “and her lessness made it all the more terrifying” – and what had brought her to the canal, where he spends his boring days. What she shares would shock any of us in real life, I’m sure, but then again, isn’t it easier opening up to strangers? “Unlike my friends, the few I have, I don’t care what you think about me.”
Rourke writes with subtle OCD, his attention to detail covering ducks and canal dredgers and airplanes; he can shift from the general picture to Boeing 747s and specific sub-aquatic birds. The book’s tone is set to somber, yet I can’t help but think of Rourke’s writing as quirky – quietly dizzying, or whatever oxymoron fits the description. I disagree with John Wray’s blurb at the back of the book – “The Canal may look, at first glance, like a love story” - because it is a love story. Only it’s not about the love story, but something else.
Overall, The Canal is one elaborately long, suspenseful scene, stretched so far, for as long you can take it, and then in one swift movement Rourke lets you go. It starts with boredom, yes, but then again boredom leads to many things.
PS. Rourke's description of rain: "a cacophony of mini-aquatic explosions" - just perfect.
Originally posted here.
First off, a story (of sorts) – here is how I ended up reading this book:
“Oh, a book on boredom! That’s a new concept. Interesting. Maybe I should read it. I definitely should read it. Or maybe the boredom thing’s just a ploy – you know, those kinds of books ‘promising narration of an equally promising point of view,’ until you actually read it and then find out it’s a total waste of time and brain cells. Then again, I wouldn’t know until I try. Oh well, no harm done in reading it.”
And that was that.
A person needs three things when reading Lee Rourke’s The Canal: patience, patience, and more patience. But don’t get me wrong – I didn’t enumerate patience three times to emphasize a great deal needed for this book. Rather, different things call for different kinds of patience, and so you need three versions of it for three things: patience for the story, patience for the (unnamed) narrator, and patience for the shifting fascinations on things, namely on ducks, gravity, and airplanes.
Am I making sense here? Not really, no? Here, let me try again.
I’m the kind of person who stubbornly reads through a book no matter what. Sometimes I put them down for a time – a day or two, a week, a month, until I run out of other books to read and I have no other choice – but for as long as I’ve started reading them, I have a need to finish them. Fortunately, The Canal didn’t need to be put down out of boredom – on the contrary, I had to stop reading to prolong the agony before the last chapter, something I did not expect to be doing when I started reading. Which is why, dear readers, it is a book that should not – I repeat, not – be judged by its first 50 pages.
The narrator – nameless, faceless, jobless even – is probably the most bored person I’ve read of. He reminds me of that dude from Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero , except that this narrator isn’t filthy rich nor young (nor with an identity, even). Our narrator, however, has a lush vocabulary. Some examples:
“I’d say it was almost crepuscular…”
“I hoped that my crumbling riposte the previous week hadn’t alarmed her.”
“…looking at the multitudinous rooftops of Hackney.”
So to say that the narration is lifeless and boring is just plain wrong – nobody uses miasma in everyday sentence, let alone on everyday thought. The upside to our male narrator is an equally nameless, albeit more mysterious, female subject – who is harboring a secret. On page 51.
Told you not to judge by its first 50 pages.
This secret is the thing that bonds these two strangers – she talks, he listens. “Bored people will listen to just about anything,” she said, and so he is consumed by her confidences, to the point that he obsesses over her identity – “and her lessness made it all the more terrifying” – and what had brought her to the canal, where he spends his boring days. What she shares would shock any of us in real life, I’m sure, but then again, isn’t it easier opening up to strangers? “Unlike my friends, the few I have, I don’t care what you think about me.”
Rourke writes with subtle OCD, his attention to detail covering ducks and canal dredgers and airplanes; he can shift from the general picture to Boeing 747s and specific sub-aquatic birds. The book’s tone is set to somber, yet I can’t help but think of Rourke’s writing as quirky – quietly dizzying, or whatever oxymoron fits the description. I disagree with John Wray’s blurb at the back of the book – “The Canal may look, at first glance, like a love story” - because it is a love story. Only it’s not about the love story, but something else.
Overall, The Canal is one elaborately long, suspenseful scene, stretched so far, for as long you can take it, and then in one swift movement Rourke lets you go. It starts with boredom, yes, but then again boredom leads to many things.
PS. Rourke's description of rain: "a cacophony of mini-aquatic explosions" - just perfect.
Originally posted here.
July 20, 2012
In this interview Lee Rourke says that The Canal is about boredom "and the fetishisation of modern culture and violence (especially the kind of violence that is deemed by its perpetrators to have a 'just cause': terrorism is a good example of this). It is also about the Regents Canal in London; a bench; a man; a woman; a gang of youths; secrets; commuting; work; bicycle bells; canal dredgers; technology; swans; Canada geese; coots; memory; civil aircraft; the London bombers and 9/11. But crucially it is about the man, the woman and the swan—and in particular the man's repressed desire, the woman's repressed fetishism, and the swan's ever-present beauty."
That is quite a list, and makes me feel like I should have liked this book more than I did. But before I try to explore what I liked and didn't, let me back up a little. The narrator of The Canal is a man who decides, one day, that instead of going to work he's going to walk to Regent's Canal. He finds a bench and sits there for the day, and then keeps coming back to it. He quits his job. He writes his former boss a letter telling him he is "bored with work full stop" and has decided to embrace his boredom by sitting by the canal (18). But it's not just the canal that the narrator is interested in: there's a woman who also comes to the canal, to the same bench on which the narrator sits: she sits there day after day, too, and the two of them begin to talk.
Which brings me to the main problem I have with the book. In a different interview, Rourke says he's "not interested in things like characterisation or plot." The narrator and the woman on the bench are nameless, and have more than a little bit of a mythic feel to them (images of Leda and the Swan come up, and the woman is also Cassandra-like). The distance this creates is slightly off-putting to me, but what's more off-putting are the ways in which the narrator and the woman are both unreliable and, to varying degrees, creepy and/or reprehensible. I realize it's all to do with the violence and technology themes that Rourke is working with, but it made me less engaged in the book, less open to it. The narrator talks about building a bomb when he was a teenager, and not really realizing that what he was doing was in any way problematic. The woman confesses to the narrator that she told her ex-boyfriend she was pregnant and needed money for an abortion, and then spent the money on a weekend away with one of her friends. The woman says she paints self-portraits and mixes the paint with her own blood. The woman says she's attracted to suicide bombers. And those are the least of the confessions she makes. The narrator doubts some of what the woman tells him; meanwhile, he sees things that may not be there: there's an animal he is certain is a fox but she says it's a dog; he has a late-night vision of her that may or may not have any truth to it.
Which isn't to say that I disliked this book entirely. I liked the way the narrative jumps from the present to the narrator's memories of various things: the way watching planes pass overhead makes him remember his first airplane ride, the way a stranger talking about traveling alone makes him think about a tree in his childhood backyard where he used to go "to be alone; to do nothing, to be nothing" (37). I liked, too, the descriptions of the canal, the sights and smells of it, the coots and Canada geese, the canal in different kinds of light and weather, and I liked the bits of London history, about the Rosemary Branch pub and the Levellers and Bunhill Fields and the building of Regent's Canal and the Islington Tunnel, in passages like this:
That is quite a list, and makes me feel like I should have liked this book more than I did. But before I try to explore what I liked and didn't, let me back up a little. The narrator of The Canal is a man who decides, one day, that instead of going to work he's going to walk to Regent's Canal. He finds a bench and sits there for the day, and then keeps coming back to it. He quits his job. He writes his former boss a letter telling him he is "bored with work full stop" and has decided to embrace his boredom by sitting by the canal (18). But it's not just the canal that the narrator is interested in: there's a woman who also comes to the canal, to the same bench on which the narrator sits: she sits there day after day, too, and the two of them begin to talk.
Which brings me to the main problem I have with the book. In a different interview, Rourke says he's "not interested in things like characterisation or plot." The narrator and the woman on the bench are nameless, and have more than a little bit of a mythic feel to them (images of Leda and the Swan come up, and the woman is also Cassandra-like). The distance this creates is slightly off-putting to me, but what's more off-putting are the ways in which the narrator and the woman are both unreliable and, to varying degrees, creepy and/or reprehensible. I realize it's all to do with the violence and technology themes that Rourke is working with, but it made me less engaged in the book, less open to it. The narrator talks about building a bomb when he was a teenager, and not really realizing that what he was doing was in any way problematic. The woman confesses to the narrator that she told her ex-boyfriend she was pregnant and needed money for an abortion, and then spent the money on a weekend away with one of her friends. The woman says she paints self-portraits and mixes the paint with her own blood. The woman says she's attracted to suicide bombers. And those are the least of the confessions she makes. The narrator doubts some of what the woman tells him; meanwhile, he sees things that may not be there: there's an animal he is certain is a fox but she says it's a dog; he has a late-night vision of her that may or may not have any truth to it.
Which isn't to say that I disliked this book entirely. I liked the way the narrative jumps from the present to the narrator's memories of various things: the way watching planes pass overhead makes him remember his first airplane ride, the way a stranger talking about traveling alone makes him think about a tree in his childhood backyard where he used to go "to be alone; to do nothing, to be nothing" (37). I liked, too, the descriptions of the canal, the sights and smells of it, the coots and Canada geese, the canal in different kinds of light and weather, and I liked the bits of London history, about the Rosemary Branch pub and the Levellers and Bunhill Fields and the building of Regent's Canal and the Islington Tunnel, in passages like this:
I remember reading how the barge owners used [to] walk their barges through the Islington Tunnel by lying on their backs on deck and literally walking along the walls of the tunnel to push it through to the other side. This antiquarian technique was called legging. All that toil and trouble, all that walking; it's hard to believe it even happened today. (99-100).
October 29, 2015
I was really excited after the first few pages, because I thought I was going to get a Nicholson Baker-style story about a guy who is bored and has lovely thoughts about completely innocuous things that he randomly happens to look at. Rourke certainly has the writing chops to pull something like that off. And at times throughout this slim volume, he'd go off into those types of tangents that I enjoy so much: finding meaning and joy by embracing the spectacularly unspectacular.
Which I think was more or less one of the main themes of the book. However, once Rourke gets into the "story" parts, he loses me. There is a pretty ridiculous love story going on, featuring a more morbid version of the "manic pixie dream girl" trope, and a lot of riddle-infused dialogue that doesn't really lead anywhere particularly special. It's all entertaining enough to keep the pages moving, and I certainly got the impression that there could've been more going on here than I was grasping, but I just wasn't taken in by the plot-driven parts.
This was a rare occasion where I wanted less plot and more meandering. It read like Tom McCarthy lite.
Which I think was more or less one of the main themes of the book. However, once Rourke gets into the "story" parts, he loses me. There is a pretty ridiculous love story going on, featuring a more morbid version of the "manic pixie dream girl" trope, and a lot of riddle-infused dialogue that doesn't really lead anywhere particularly special. It's all entertaining enough to keep the pages moving, and I certainly got the impression that there could've been more going on here than I was grasping, but I just wasn't taken in by the plot-driven parts.
This was a rare occasion where I wanted less plot and more meandering. It read like Tom McCarthy lite.
April 16, 2024
I thought this was a charming little book which managed to capture one of my favourite London spots really well. It definitely has a 2010s vibe to it with an uninspiring male narrator, but he provided some enjoyable musings about the beauty of doing nothing and rejecting modern distractions (eg work) that cause life to pass you by. Not sure sitting by the canal for hours each day, as he does, is the answer, but there is some kind of message here to just take it all in a bit more often.
June 23, 2025
I liked the idea of a book about boredom but we needed to get to know and like the two main characters a bit.
February 27, 2018
“Because I don’t know you..I find it easier to talk to strangers, real strangers...”
Sinking into this one, I felt a complacency for truly the depth of our lives can only be understood without bias; from a distance..and through this operative mode do we realise what’s lacking, what’s worth it, how absolutely unpredictable & miraculous life is.
(Peddle not time away in the disbelief that we don’t serve a purpose, wait it out and see what unravels and read the definition of the term, affinity.)
The masks we wear will conceal our truths for a limited time and it is for this reason, don’t bother ‘asking for our names’ but rather gain wisdom through one another. If we’re bored, something is amiss - we must recognise what that is and only through encounters or lack thereof do we find our reflections, our impressions such as they are, truly revealed and metaphorically speaking attempt to “nip and tuck” at what needs to be corrected.
How evocatively memories sometimes function us, how strange it is confronting ourselves with a change and evolving perhaps due to a single lone instance/person in our lives that brings us to re-evaluate our ‘self’, who we actually are deep inside...Well, for starters, it’s sometimes a wake up call and I believe we must keep on getting them.
Sinking into this one, I felt a complacency for truly the depth of our lives can only be understood without bias; from a distance..and through this operative mode do we realise what’s lacking, what’s worth it, how absolutely unpredictable & miraculous life is.
(Peddle not time away in the disbelief that we don’t serve a purpose, wait it out and see what unravels and read the definition of the term, affinity.)
The masks we wear will conceal our truths for a limited time and it is for this reason, don’t bother ‘asking for our names’ but rather gain wisdom through one another. If we’re bored, something is amiss - we must recognise what that is and only through encounters or lack thereof do we find our reflections, our impressions such as they are, truly revealed and metaphorically speaking attempt to “nip and tuck” at what needs to be corrected.
How evocatively memories sometimes function us, how strange it is confronting ourselves with a change and evolving perhaps due to a single lone instance/person in our lives that brings us to re-evaluate our ‘self’, who we actually are deep inside...Well, for starters, it’s sometimes a wake up call and I believe we must keep on getting them.
July 6, 2010
Lee Rourke’s debut novel The Canal is a simple story that packs big themes: an unnamed man quits his job one day and walks to the canal to sit on a bench. While on the bench he aims to embrace the boredom that envelopes him. At first the narrator is absorbed in the mundane routine of the canal, until a woman joins him on the bench and things start take a more sinister turn.
The woman shows up at the canal day after day, quickly absorbing the narrator with her presence. Form hereon in The Canal takes a mesmerising turn. The woman gradually unravels a chilling tale that frightens and fascinates. Slowly but surely the man is drawn into the woman’s world as she begins to confess to him a number of terrible acts she has committed. Little by little she begins to reveal to him the terror of her actions, bringing the man into a dark and twisted world that is tense and electrifying.
It is a novel that operates on many levels, most significantly hanging on the Heideggerian notion that we are ‘suspended in dread’ and drawing from many Greek myths, including Leda and the Swan. Like Heidegger argued in his lectures on metaphysics, the narrator of The Canal is hanging, suspended in some sort of dread, his everyday being has slipped away to reveal a gaping void, a visible nothingness, swathed in a fog of indifference. The narrator’s dread cuts through this fog, revealing a fear for something that is ‘out there’ and out of his control, unlike Heidegger, who believed that this slipping away was a good thing (it gives us scope to rebuild). The narrator slips further into the woman’s world, taking him further away from his initial desire to embrace boredom.
Interwoven with this damning slide into the unknown is the symbol of the beautiful swan, signified by more than a passing allusion to the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan. It is a motif that fits in snugly with Rourke’s aims: the sense of impending catastrophe, for example (Leda gives birth to Helen and the event of Troy isn’t that far away from the looming events that may or may not happen in The Canal). In what could have seemed clunky and out of place in other novels here glides effortlessly underneath the surface of Rourke’s exquisite treatise on the nature of our finite existence.
What makes this book particularly interesting, is that Rourke manages to cleverly discuss (in a series of cryptic conversations and statements) the value of fiction and reality itself, by playing them both off each other until we are unsure just what is real in The Canal and what is unreal. The nature of memory and language is laid out ready for inspection, inviting the reader to participate in this blurring of the age old foundations of everything that is deemed ‘literary’ – posing the question: is any of this real?
At the outset The Canal seems like a pleasant meditation on boredom, but it quickly morphs into a philosophical treatise on the nature of boredom, technology, violence, and working out how we go about securing our foothold in a world that is spiralling out of control. As the man on the bench simply says: ‘I needed something to fill the gap . . . to return me to the ground beneath my feet and hide away from our gaping hole like everyone else.’ The Canal is Rourke’s attempt to fill the gap, and in some strange way he brilliantly succeeds. It is a story that needs close scrutiny and is a book to be savoured. Although brief, I spent much time with this book, deliberating over the questions and ideas it generates. With The Canal Rourke has created and astonishing tale that terrifies and delights. Lee Rourke is definitely one to watch.
The woman shows up at the canal day after day, quickly absorbing the narrator with her presence. Form hereon in The Canal takes a mesmerising turn. The woman gradually unravels a chilling tale that frightens and fascinates. Slowly but surely the man is drawn into the woman’s world as she begins to confess to him a number of terrible acts she has committed. Little by little she begins to reveal to him the terror of her actions, bringing the man into a dark and twisted world that is tense and electrifying.
It is a novel that operates on many levels, most significantly hanging on the Heideggerian notion that we are ‘suspended in dread’ and drawing from many Greek myths, including Leda and the Swan. Like Heidegger argued in his lectures on metaphysics, the narrator of The Canal is hanging, suspended in some sort of dread, his everyday being has slipped away to reveal a gaping void, a visible nothingness, swathed in a fog of indifference. The narrator’s dread cuts through this fog, revealing a fear for something that is ‘out there’ and out of his control, unlike Heidegger, who believed that this slipping away was a good thing (it gives us scope to rebuild). The narrator slips further into the woman’s world, taking him further away from his initial desire to embrace boredom.
Interwoven with this damning slide into the unknown is the symbol of the beautiful swan, signified by more than a passing allusion to the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan. It is a motif that fits in snugly with Rourke’s aims: the sense of impending catastrophe, for example (Leda gives birth to Helen and the event of Troy isn’t that far away from the looming events that may or may not happen in The Canal). In what could have seemed clunky and out of place in other novels here glides effortlessly underneath the surface of Rourke’s exquisite treatise on the nature of our finite existence.
What makes this book particularly interesting, is that Rourke manages to cleverly discuss (in a series of cryptic conversations and statements) the value of fiction and reality itself, by playing them both off each other until we are unsure just what is real in The Canal and what is unreal. The nature of memory and language is laid out ready for inspection, inviting the reader to participate in this blurring of the age old foundations of everything that is deemed ‘literary’ – posing the question: is any of this real?
At the outset The Canal seems like a pleasant meditation on boredom, but it quickly morphs into a philosophical treatise on the nature of boredom, technology, violence, and working out how we go about securing our foothold in a world that is spiralling out of control. As the man on the bench simply says: ‘I needed something to fill the gap . . . to return me to the ground beneath my feet and hide away from our gaping hole like everyone else.’ The Canal is Rourke’s attempt to fill the gap, and in some strange way he brilliantly succeeds. It is a story that needs close scrutiny and is a book to be savoured. Although brief, I spent much time with this book, deliberating over the questions and ideas it generates. With The Canal Rourke has created and astonishing tale that terrifies and delights. Lee Rourke is definitely one to watch.
June 26, 2010
The cover said this was a pre-corrected copy, and not to quote, but here goes:
"..."
That's a fairly common conversational exchange in this slim volume, in which the silences exchanged are putatively as meaningful, or moreso, than the typical conversations in which we fill each another's ears with the tiresome cacophony of tedious miscellany with which we try to hide from ourselves the boring essential mediocrity of existence. Or something like that.
I should have been warned by the publisher's plug comparing Rourke to such "greats" as Joyce, and perhaps this somewhat disqualifies me as a competent reviewer when I admit that I found Ulysses ("the greatest novel of the 20th century") utterly unreadable and without merit. That the text opens with a quote from Heidegger seals the deal: this is a tale about sub-text, in which nothing means what it says, crudely corporeal players become allusions to existential abstractions, and every-thing is used as an inadequate anthropogenized communicative device for the deeply felt but hidden mystery of no-thing. Et cetera.
The story -- here I reveal my crass and boorish dependency on such artificial and limiting strictures as plot, character, theme -- involves an unnamed man who chooses to forgo the normal distractions of workaday life and instead sit on a bench overlooking a dirty and neglected canal, observing the swans and coots and reflecting on the woefully unappreciated and uniquely potent joys of: boredom. That's right, he sits there thinking for pages on end about just what a wonderful concept boredom can be: running his tranquil mental tongue over its many textures, crevasses, and unexplored aisles.
Oh, well there are some other bits. A woman is involved (there usually is, I find). Today's yobbish youth are found both vulgar and unrefined. The universe, in the many tricks and turns it plays on us, is unfair and unremorseful. Modern life is gray, and technology...well now. The typical message at this point would be the Luddite aphorism that technology robs us of our essential, primal, animalistic raw humanity, that we have lost our souls to these gleaming machines. This book at least charted an unusual course here, suggesting that the machines are in fact the only thing of value, that we might find our highest actualization in fully sublimating ourselves to them (finding nirvana within the illusion, as it were). And some bits about conventional morality being a delusion, causeless murder being the ultimate expression of freedom, the usual stuff that Heidegger's apologists prefer to sweep under the rug. I was waiting for a bit about a forest, but apparently here the forest was disguised as a canal. Clever.
Did anything happen in the end? Did we learn anything from this [mercifully:] brief discourse on the transcendent joys of deliberate non-action, the frailty of human intercourse, and the dangers of talking to strangers?
I don't know, I was watching the ducks.
Two stars: one for making me think hard to find meaning in this non-story (that I failed does not devalue the attempt), and one for at least being short.
"..."
That's a fairly common conversational exchange in this slim volume, in which the silences exchanged are putatively as meaningful, or moreso, than the typical conversations in which we fill each another's ears with the tiresome cacophony of tedious miscellany with which we try to hide from ourselves the boring essential mediocrity of existence. Or something like that.
I should have been warned by the publisher's plug comparing Rourke to such "greats" as Joyce, and perhaps this somewhat disqualifies me as a competent reviewer when I admit that I found Ulysses ("the greatest novel of the 20th century") utterly unreadable and without merit. That the text opens with a quote from Heidegger seals the deal: this is a tale about sub-text, in which nothing means what it says, crudely corporeal players become allusions to existential abstractions, and every-thing is used as an inadequate anthropogenized communicative device for the deeply felt but hidden mystery of no-thing. Et cetera.
The story -- here I reveal my crass and boorish dependency on such artificial and limiting strictures as plot, character, theme -- involves an unnamed man who chooses to forgo the normal distractions of workaday life and instead sit on a bench overlooking a dirty and neglected canal, observing the swans and coots and reflecting on the woefully unappreciated and uniquely potent joys of: boredom. That's right, he sits there thinking for pages on end about just what a wonderful concept boredom can be: running his tranquil mental tongue over its many textures, crevasses, and unexplored aisles.
Oh, well there are some other bits. A woman is involved (there usually is, I find). Today's yobbish youth are found both vulgar and unrefined. The universe, in the many tricks and turns it plays on us, is unfair and unremorseful. Modern life is gray, and technology...well now. The typical message at this point would be the Luddite aphorism that technology robs us of our essential, primal, animalistic raw humanity, that we have lost our souls to these gleaming machines. This book at least charted an unusual course here, suggesting that the machines are in fact the only thing of value, that we might find our highest actualization in fully sublimating ourselves to them (finding nirvana within the illusion, as it were). And some bits about conventional morality being a delusion, causeless murder being the ultimate expression of freedom, the usual stuff that Heidegger's apologists prefer to sweep under the rug. I was waiting for a bit about a forest, but apparently here the forest was disguised as a canal. Clever.
Did anything happen in the end? Did we learn anything from this [mercifully:] brief discourse on the transcendent joys of deliberate non-action, the frailty of human intercourse, and the dangers of talking to strangers?
I don't know, I was watching the ducks.
Two stars: one for making me think hard to find meaning in this non-story (that I failed does not devalue the attempt), and one for at least being short.
July 6, 2010
Flat-screen monitors, an old park bench, the "Park Crew", suicide bombers, swans, an Airbus A320, an Audi TT 225, an unknown woman at a funeral, boredom...
All of these things factor together to make The Canal by Lee Rourke a fascinating glimpse into boredom. How can boredom be interesting? Don't we avoid it? The unnamed narrator has left his job, spending his days ruminating on life on an old bench near a canal in downtown London. It's not the most scenic location: dirty water, a roving gang, commuters, and the occasional coot or swan may pass nearby, but no one seems to sit. Until him.
As he sits, he imagines the lives of the people who, quite literally, cross his path and he reflects on his own experiences. Having the freedom to just sit is something he's not used to: "it's the power of everyday boredom that compels people to do things-even if that something is nothing." He notices that all the efforts to avoid boredom, usually in order to be more productive or to entertain, never really accomplish anything. It is 'found' time, an appreciation for not filling every moment, that makes time more meaningful for him. And this he does, spending more and more time at the canal. It is only after the pace of his life has slowed that the really exciting and life-changing events begin to happen. But this is no new-age inspirational story. What he discovers are terrible crimes and intentional cruelties, all tied together by acts done out of boredom.
"I've often thought that we seek reality in places and not in ourselves....We need things, extra things that help us to make sense of it all; we need the space where things can happen, where these spaces become a thing-it is only at that point, when space becomes a thing to us, that we truly feel real." The narrator considers the nature of time as an object, one to be treasured. The different characters he meets are similarly lost, filling up time without understanding that their actions are actually just throwing it away. "It baffles me why people are so obsessed with trying to fill this time with holidays, cars, designer clothes, technology, energetic sports, et cetera. Why would they want time to pass by quickly?...Those who bemoan the speedy passing of time at the end of their life are surely those same people who tried to fill it up with things to quicken its passing anyway, aren't they?"
The novel is brief: we know little about the narrator's appearance, home, or prior job: he doesn't even have a cell phone. We know small details about his family but the impression is that he doesn't see them. He's a complicated figure: he is fascinated by flight, admiring the planes descending into Heathrow, and yet he's nearly motionless himself. Throughout the remainder of the story, the concepts of time and flight intersect, and the denouement finds both fractured. The effect is complex and mysterious and one of those rare books that may yield more insight by being read again.
All of these things factor together to make The Canal by Lee Rourke a fascinating glimpse into boredom. How can boredom be interesting? Don't we avoid it? The unnamed narrator has left his job, spending his days ruminating on life on an old bench near a canal in downtown London. It's not the most scenic location: dirty water, a roving gang, commuters, and the occasional coot or swan may pass nearby, but no one seems to sit. Until him.
As he sits, he imagines the lives of the people who, quite literally, cross his path and he reflects on his own experiences. Having the freedom to just sit is something he's not used to: "it's the power of everyday boredom that compels people to do things-even if that something is nothing." He notices that all the efforts to avoid boredom, usually in order to be more productive or to entertain, never really accomplish anything. It is 'found' time, an appreciation for not filling every moment, that makes time more meaningful for him. And this he does, spending more and more time at the canal. It is only after the pace of his life has slowed that the really exciting and life-changing events begin to happen. But this is no new-age inspirational story. What he discovers are terrible crimes and intentional cruelties, all tied together by acts done out of boredom.
"I've often thought that we seek reality in places and not in ourselves....We need things, extra things that help us to make sense of it all; we need the space where things can happen, where these spaces become a thing-it is only at that point, when space becomes a thing to us, that we truly feel real." The narrator considers the nature of time as an object, one to be treasured. The different characters he meets are similarly lost, filling up time without understanding that their actions are actually just throwing it away. "It baffles me why people are so obsessed with trying to fill this time with holidays, cars, designer clothes, technology, energetic sports, et cetera. Why would they want time to pass by quickly?...Those who bemoan the speedy passing of time at the end of their life are surely those same people who tried to fill it up with things to quicken its passing anyway, aren't they?"
The novel is brief: we know little about the narrator's appearance, home, or prior job: he doesn't even have a cell phone. We know small details about his family but the impression is that he doesn't see them. He's a complicated figure: he is fascinated by flight, admiring the planes descending into Heathrow, and yet he's nearly motionless himself. Throughout the remainder of the story, the concepts of time and flight intersect, and the denouement finds both fractured. The effect is complex and mysterious and one of those rare books that may yield more insight by being read again.
July 27, 2010
The unnamed narrator of The Canal sets out to embrace boredom, saying, "It is the power of everyday boredom that compells people to do things -- even if that something is nothing." That tension between boredom as drive to action and boredom as stasis was the core of the novel for me, because as the narrator tries to repeat his (in)actions each day -- sitting on the same bench by the same stretch of canal, with the same woman and watching the same swans and office workers -- he struggles against changes internal and external alike. There's a recurring focus on transportation, from the airplanes he is a knowledgeable enthusiast of, to the canal itself, to cars and buses and even walking. And all of those, in one way or another, become destructive -- whether on the large scale like 9/11, or more localized acts of violence. The narrator embraces boredom and aims for stasis, but he also says, " And as our world becomes increasingly boring, as the future progresses into a quagmire of nothingness, our world will becoming increasingly more violent. It is an impulse that controls us. It is an impulse we cannot ignore." Violence is the inevitable outcome of ANY action, even the action of inaction, and all progress and change are creeping toward destruction in time. On the other hand, DENYING boredom leads one to "superfluous activity," eventually violent, so we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. The best hope is an infinite recursion of inactivity and self-extraction, such as the narrator tries to create by sitting at the canal, but unlike the static loop he manages to create in a game of Pong (probably my favorite passage of the novel), actual stasis isn't easy to come by.
I wondered, while reading, what a truly "static" novel would feel like, how dull it might be, and what kind of action it might lead me to as a reader. Because The Canal itself ISN'T boring, ratcheting up its sparse plot and raising the stakes as the story proceeds. Maybe a story arisen from boredom cannot succeed if it is actually the enactment of boredom. Yet I was always aware that by the novel's logic some destruction is necessitated by the actions of writing and reading -- a violence against the "real" world, perhaps, committed by stripping away its trappings to create something so tidy and constrained as a novel. It never let me forget that it was constructed, not something natural, because of its nameless, mostly veiled characters (eventually represented by empty, underlined spaces where names are conspicuously absent). As readers, we demand forward momentum and the familiar trappings of drama even from a novel about avoiding them, and the tension of being suspended in such a contradiction pushes us to ask new questions and reach new ideas. Like an infinite recursion of Pong which isn't quite a "game" any longer, and is waiting for us to find a new word.
I wondered, while reading, what a truly "static" novel would feel like, how dull it might be, and what kind of action it might lead me to as a reader. Because The Canal itself ISN'T boring, ratcheting up its sparse plot and raising the stakes as the story proceeds. Maybe a story arisen from boredom cannot succeed if it is actually the enactment of boredom. Yet I was always aware that by the novel's logic some destruction is necessitated by the actions of writing and reading -- a violence against the "real" world, perhaps, committed by stripping away its trappings to create something so tidy and constrained as a novel. It never let me forget that it was constructed, not something natural, because of its nameless, mostly veiled characters (eventually represented by empty, underlined spaces where names are conspicuously absent). As readers, we demand forward momentum and the familiar trappings of drama even from a novel about avoiding them, and the tension of being suspended in such a contradiction pushes us to ask new questions and reach new ideas. Like an infinite recursion of Pong which isn't quite a "game" any longer, and is waiting for us to find a new word.
July 27, 2010
A wonderful debut from Lee Rourke. This is a novel of its time, a novel of today and the Britain of now. Yes, it's about boredom and the effect of boredom on the individual, but it's about so much more. It shows the brutality of Britain today, the blank soul at the heart of the nation and the stultifying effects of capitalism spun out of control.
It will probably take a couple more reads to fully understand what the author has achieved here, there's such a great depth in what he's written.
I'll also be interested to look back in five years' time to see how this book sits amongst other UK fiction. I'm sure it'll be viewed as a shining light for great, intelligent writing.
Very definitely recommended (and while you're about it, treat yourself to his collection of short stories - Everyday)
It will probably take a couple more reads to fully understand what the author has achieved here, there's such a great depth in what he's written.
I'll also be interested to look back in five years' time to see how this book sits amongst other UK fiction. I'm sure it'll be viewed as a shining light for great, intelligent writing.
Very definitely recommended (and while you're about it, treat yourself to his collection of short stories - Everyday)
October 5, 2012
This novel is allegedly about boredom. I think boredom is when you don’t like what you’re doing, you want to do something else. But the protagonist of this novel sits on a bench near the Grand Union canal doing nothing all day and is quite content. That’s more zen meditation than boredom. The tale isn’t about boredom, it’s about violence. The hero meets with a disturbed young woman and local teenage gang who drag him out of his stupor and into something much worse, because a story about someone sitting looking at a canal would be a nice idea for a tumblr, but not a novel.
The descriptive detail is so exact that I wonder if in writing the book, Rourke just sat in the spot he describes and noted down everything that happened. I might go down there to see if there are any Canalian fangirls and boys on the same bench, reading the book.
The descriptive detail is so exact that I wonder if in writing the book, Rourke just sat in the spot he describes and noted down everything that happened. I might go down there to see if there are any Canalian fangirls and boys on the same bench, reading the book.
November 11, 2018
Nothing happened until the end and by then I was unengaged. Some action was referred to in dialogue and there were some slightly less passive memories but there was no dynamism in their description. In fact, there was no energy to the book at all.
It was also inadequately proof-read for typos, tense-consistencies and action consistencies. Although the main subject seemed to be the setting, that was described so poorly that I was never sure of the layout of the small patch of canal-side on which most of the inaction took place.
I don't feel I know anything or have developed or vicariously experienced anything more than I had done before I read this book.
It was also inadequately proof-read for typos, tense-consistencies and action consistencies. Although the main subject seemed to be the setting, that was described so poorly that I was never sure of the layout of the small patch of canal-side on which most of the inaction took place.
I don't feel I know anything or have developed or vicariously experienced anything more than I had done before I read this book.
November 20, 2024
Das hat leider gar nicht zusammengepasst, denn ich konnte dem Buch rein gar nichts abgewinnen, vermutlich habe ich die Intention des Autors einfach nicht verstanden. Die beiden Hauptpersonen waren mir total unsympathisch - der Ich-Erzähler, der am Kanal die Langweile zelebriert, war mir zu passiv und selbstmitleidig, die Frau unglaublich egoistisch, ja geradezu menschenverachtend. Einzig der Schwan war ein kleiner Lichtblick in dieser ansonsten für mich völlig belanglosen, ja: langweiligen Geschichte. Immerhin hab ich jetzt wieder 2cm mehr Platz im Bücherregal. Fazit: So war das mit der Langeweile wohl nicht gemeint...
January 27, 2021
A miraculous study in inspiring boredom. And the book’s weight and gravity, as our gongoozler stares at the real canal over the edge of the iron bridge – but staring at what in it or on it? Yes, a canal does have a sort of estuary: a basin. Wenlock Basin now become Wenlock Edge. The Boeing 747 banking above. The ultimate winding-hole.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
March 6, 2021
Reasonably gripping story about a rather weird bloke who, being very bored, meets a woman by a canal. At first, it seems that it's just going to be a story about what they do (or don't do), and say (or don't say) to each other. But she has a secret and turns out to be even weirder than him. It all ends rather messily and the author seems to rush the ending a bit but then attempts to bring in a couple of more abstract elements as if wanting to give the story a philosophical meaning - which I missed entirely.
March 6, 2022
I can’t believe I finished this book- only because Rourke paints haunting images. But it’s hard to make a book about boredom not boring
June 24, 2024
A chill book about boredom, just like something I needed… sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s thought provoking. Not much is happening there until it starts to… and then some more events happen, and then the ending is like “WHAT?!”. It was an interesting read, I was in it. I do recommend it.
November 12, 2011
From my post here: http://5cense.com/11/venice-2.htm:
If you stop to consider anything long enough, even boredom, you should be able to find interesting connections lurking beneath the otherwise banal surface. «When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you,» or whatever it was that Nietzsche said. Thing is, Rourke gives up staring into the canal after the first few pages. Shit happens in the book & he loses sight of the initial boring premise. Which perhaps is the point—if you embrace boredom, shit will happen. Boredom is only boredom if you are afraid of being bored. And boredom is in the eyes of the beholder. This claim that the novel is about boredom allows Rourke to deflect all criticism because he could just say that was his intent. Yes, it's a novel. It says so on the cover. I don't understand why sometimes novels need to declare themselves as such—is it to keep people from confusing it for something else? The book is published by Melville House, known to me primarily as Tao Lin's publisher. And I guess there's some similarities with Tao, as well as with Shane Jones, who blurbed the book. The book was short-listed for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, which is no surprise considering Rourke writes for The Guardian.
It's the kind of book you'd expect a book critic to write. He's obviously well-read & connected & able to draw on a lot of writer's before him. Besides the comparison to Beckett, at first i felt like it was being set up like Crime & Punishment. And there's the obvious nod to Tom McCarthy, though to compare the two belittles McCarthy. The stark dialogue reminded me a bit of David Mamet or Harold Pinter, though Rourke does this annoying thing where he'll just have a character repeat the same thing over & over (at one point a woman asks him "Do you like the canal then?" 14 times in a row—i can't imagine that happening in real life or on stage without someone slapping her after 3 or 4). The Guardian blurb on the back of the book (am i the only one who notices these blatant conflict of interests?) says: «Leading light of the self-styled Off-Beat generation, Rourke stakes his claim as heir apparent to greats such as Ballard, Joyce or Houellebecq.» Joyce, Houellebecq? Whitey, please. Maybe that's what he ... er ... i mean ... 'The Guardian,' means by 'self-styled'—Rourke is trying to style himself after these fine folks. Ballard, yeah, sure you can see where he tries to mimic Ballard with some success. In fact, there's a part where his female love interest runs over a stranger in her car in a just-for-the-hell-of-it Ballardian way (with a Camus twist). The object of his desire also has a fetish for suicide bombers. «Those extraordinary young men. I often dream about them, their brown skin. I speak to them in my dreams, I caress them in my dreams, I fantasize about them during the day,» she says. Ballard & others can get away with writing about sick anti-social things, but when Rourke tries to mimic him, it comes off as forced & not believable (not to mention racist). It's like how some comedians can go on a warped racist rant on stage because they are confident in their delivery or they are somehow justified & don't question themselves. It's not a talent everyone is born with.
...
If you stop to consider anything long enough, even boredom, you should be able to find interesting connections lurking beneath the otherwise banal surface. «When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you,» or whatever it was that Nietzsche said. Thing is, Rourke gives up staring into the canal after the first few pages. Shit happens in the book & he loses sight of the initial boring premise. Which perhaps is the point—if you embrace boredom, shit will happen. Boredom is only boredom if you are afraid of being bored. And boredom is in the eyes of the beholder. This claim that the novel is about boredom allows Rourke to deflect all criticism because he could just say that was his intent. Yes, it's a novel. It says so on the cover. I don't understand why sometimes novels need to declare themselves as such—is it to keep people from confusing it for something else? The book is published by Melville House, known to me primarily as Tao Lin's publisher. And I guess there's some similarities with Tao, as well as with Shane Jones, who blurbed the book. The book was short-listed for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, which is no surprise considering Rourke writes for The Guardian.
It's the kind of book you'd expect a book critic to write. He's obviously well-read & connected & able to draw on a lot of writer's before him. Besides the comparison to Beckett, at first i felt like it was being set up like Crime & Punishment. And there's the obvious nod to Tom McCarthy, though to compare the two belittles McCarthy. The stark dialogue reminded me a bit of David Mamet or Harold Pinter, though Rourke does this annoying thing where he'll just have a character repeat the same thing over & over (at one point a woman asks him "Do you like the canal then?" 14 times in a row—i can't imagine that happening in real life or on stage without someone slapping her after 3 or 4). The Guardian blurb on the back of the book (am i the only one who notices these blatant conflict of interests?) says: «Leading light of the self-styled Off-Beat generation, Rourke stakes his claim as heir apparent to greats such as Ballard, Joyce or Houellebecq.» Joyce, Houellebecq? Whitey, please. Maybe that's what he ... er ... i mean ... 'The Guardian,' means by 'self-styled'—Rourke is trying to style himself after these fine folks. Ballard, yeah, sure you can see where he tries to mimic Ballard with some success. In fact, there's a part where his female love interest runs over a stranger in her car in a just-for-the-hell-of-it Ballardian way (with a Camus twist). The object of his desire also has a fetish for suicide bombers. «Those extraordinary young men. I often dream about them, their brown skin. I speak to them in my dreams, I caress them in my dreams, I fantasize about them during the day,» she says. Ballard & others can get away with writing about sick anti-social things, but when Rourke tries to mimic him, it comes off as forced & not believable (not to mention racist). It's like how some comedians can go on a warped racist rant on stage because they are confident in their delivery or they are somehow justified & don't question themselves. It's not a talent everyone is born with.
...
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June 16, 2012Oh dear. This was a truly terrible novel. Full of cliches, hackneyed phrases and sentences of the lowest quality. I lost count of how many times he describes the canal as having 'murky water' but I'm almost certain it's at least every other page. It's a canal! We have seen them before! We get it! He also has a really bad habit of over qualifying things as if - and there are way too many 'as if's in this novel - he doesn't trust the reader to get whats going on. This is all pretty basic stuff and should have been spotted by any decent editor. If the poor quality of the writing doesn't make you cringe there's plenty of other stuff that will. The section about suicide bombers is embarrasingly bad as is all of the pseudo philosophical guff spouted by the narrator. And if you like your novels with characters forget it. Non of the characters here are anything near believable as a living, breathing person. How this 'novel' ever got to publication, let alone won a national literay prize, is beyond me. Comparisons to Ballard, Joyce and Houellenbecq - as are made by a Guardian Critic on the back cover - are frankly ridiculous. It reads to me like it was written by some angst-ridden teenage nihilist. The only reason I read through to the end - and what an end it is - was because I was curious to see just how bad it could get. It's bad. Oh man is it bad. One reviewer - one of the few I found who wasn't lording it over this oh so cack of novels - described it as drowning in a pool of it's own allegory and I know exactly what he means. If you are ever given this novel or for whatever reason find yourself in ownership of it then I suggest you either a) use it as a teaching aid to show students how not to write a novel or b) go to your nearest canal and fling it in, preferably at a swan. Dreadful! Just dreadful!
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June 13, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2011/01/14/r...
Review by Eric Jett
While others continue to distract themselves with work, television, and the occasional book, the unnamed narrator of Lee Rourke’s debut novel, The Canal, has resigned from his unremarkable job to loiter full-time at a local towpath. His goal is to embrace boredom, but this takes a backseat when he is joined by a gang of violent teens and a young woman made of secrets and lies.
Unlike a traditional flâneur, idly roaming the city, Rourke’s narrator sits down and lets the city come to him. Overhead, planes trail each other to the nearby runways while, across the canal, a man in an office walks back and forth between desks. Swans go through similar motions on the water below while a homeless woman by the bench asks, over and over, “Do you like the canal, then? Do you like the canal, then?” But there’s more to boredom than routine. Terrorism, gang violence, and gentrification also pass by, obscuring the canal like floating debris.
Drama rises from our aversion to boredom, the narrator asserts, and if we could only eschew our distractions and embrace our boredom, many of our problems would fall away. Rourke complements this asceticism with a pared-down style in which vocabulary is limited, memories are incomplete, and observations are qualified with maybe and probably. These spare pieces can coalesce to form moments of surprising tension for a novel about boredom, but the final picture still has many cracks.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2011/01/14/r...
Review by Eric Jett
While others continue to distract themselves with work, television, and the occasional book, the unnamed narrator of Lee Rourke’s debut novel, The Canal, has resigned from his unremarkable job to loiter full-time at a local towpath. His goal is to embrace boredom, but this takes a backseat when he is joined by a gang of violent teens and a young woman made of secrets and lies.
Unlike a traditional flâneur, idly roaming the city, Rourke’s narrator sits down and lets the city come to him. Overhead, planes trail each other to the nearby runways while, across the canal, a man in an office walks back and forth between desks. Swans go through similar motions on the water below while a homeless woman by the bench asks, over and over, “Do you like the canal, then? Do you like the canal, then?” But there’s more to boredom than routine. Terrorism, gang violence, and gentrification also pass by, obscuring the canal like floating debris.
Drama rises from our aversion to boredom, the narrator asserts, and if we could only eschew our distractions and embrace our boredom, many of our problems would fall away. Rourke complements this asceticism with a pared-down style in which vocabulary is limited, memories are incomplete, and observations are qualified with maybe and probably. These spare pieces can coalesce to form moments of surprising tension for a novel about boredom, but the final picture still has many cracks.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2011/01/14/r...
March 15, 2012
Maybe the narrator of this book is experiencing something that is on the outskirts of an unnamed state of street meditation: “The word ‘boring’ is usually used to denote a lack of meaning—an acute emptiness. But the weight of boredom at that precise moment was almost overwhelming, it sure as hell wasn’t empty of anything; it was tangible—it had meaning.” (8) I don’t want the narrator of The Canal to be a Buddhist, though. If he is too rough to be anything different, this creates a tactile surface with enough purchases to actually attach to as a reader.
Could a boredom cult, in deed if not in name, be a kind of misunderstood mindfulness? Maybe all morality is half-baked and underachieved…and a book is a catalog of the stages of moral health as it wavers in and out of illnesses of varying degrees of danger.
Another thing about boredom as an organizing concept. Obviously “a writer” can have a lot of different attributes: more or less politically aware, more or less of a dissident, more or less wounded, et cetera. Does the statis of writing (the having to be motionless in body) seep, unawares, into the narrative and the word choices an author makes? Is there a kind of boredom that is a prerequisite for writing (the waiting, the pacing, the wandering)? Is a writer especially primed to create characters that are embodiments of boredom…because he is a writer?
There's an astonishing passage in this book of two people watching a swan take off from the canal. It has that kind of super-relevant oddity. Here, Mr. Rourke is mindful as hell.
Could a boredom cult, in deed if not in name, be a kind of misunderstood mindfulness? Maybe all morality is half-baked and underachieved…and a book is a catalog of the stages of moral health as it wavers in and out of illnesses of varying degrees of danger.
Another thing about boredom as an organizing concept. Obviously “a writer” can have a lot of different attributes: more or less politically aware, more or less of a dissident, more or less wounded, et cetera. Does the statis of writing (the having to be motionless in body) seep, unawares, into the narrative and the word choices an author makes? Is there a kind of boredom that is a prerequisite for writing (the waiting, the pacing, the wandering)? Is a writer especially primed to create characters that are embodiments of boredom…because he is a writer?
There's an astonishing passage in this book of two people watching a swan take off from the canal. It has that kind of super-relevant oddity. Here, Mr. Rourke is mindful as hell.
April 24, 2013
Set along a stretch of the Regent’s Canal between Islington Tunnel and the Hackney, the novel centres on two characters, between whom, in terms of action, for most of the novel nothing much happens - but this would be an entirely superficial reading. Beneath the surface, teased at in the dialogue, whole lifetimes of anger, regret and sheer boredom gnaw at the protagonists until, as if the intensity of these suppressed emotions has got too much, things finally reach boiling point, as the novel reaches a genuinely shocking, but not quite conclusive moment.
In some regards The Canal is a study of boredom, but it makes for compelling reading. Rourke’s deceptively simple style and spare prose says an awful lot with a little.
The fact that much of the action takes place within such a small and particular area adds much to the intensity of the story. Reminiscent in some ways of a Pinter play, where as much can be read into the gaps between speech or narrative as in the prose itself, the novel is packed with beautifully observed – though often awkward or even violent moments.
Where Rourke excels is in his ability to capture a very real sense of those inbetween places, or non-spaces, in our lives which we all too frequently pass through without ever properly regarding. An outstanding debut and well worth picking up and reading.
In some regards The Canal is a study of boredom, but it makes for compelling reading. Rourke’s deceptively simple style and spare prose says an awful lot with a little.
The fact that much of the action takes place within such a small and particular area adds much to the intensity of the story. Reminiscent in some ways of a Pinter play, where as much can be read into the gaps between speech or narrative as in the prose itself, the novel is packed with beautifully observed – though often awkward or even violent moments.
Where Rourke excels is in his ability to capture a very real sense of those inbetween places, or non-spaces, in our lives which we all too frequently pass through without ever properly regarding. An outstanding debut and well worth picking up and reading.
August 4, 2012
It's great that the odd experimental British novel is still being published and receiving some recognition, but this isn't especially good, original or memorable. The blurb includes a quote from someone comparing Rourke to Joyce, Ballard and Houellebecq, which is far from the mark. I can see how you may think he has things in common with Delillo, Ballard or Houellebecq because of the blank, inexpressive, gloomy tone of his writing, but these writers explore broad social themes and diagnose aspects of modern life that aren't quite as apparent to other people. The Canal is very introspective and explores existential themes rather than social themes, but not particularly well. His writing reminds me more of Hamsun, Beckett and Camus, but he's nowhere near as good as any of them. I don't really know who this book is aimed at or who its fans are because if you are familiar with these writers you are going to make an unflattering comparison. You would have to not have read these writers to think what Rourke is doing is new or interesting. Still, it's good to have a little avant garde energy around in English Literature at the moment, and I'll have to get around to giving Tom McCarthy and Lars Iyer a go as well.
September 14, 2012
I had read a well known author say this was one of the best books on boredom he had ever read. So, of course, I had to read it! It is very well written. You cannot gloss over it as there are quite a few comments giving food for thought, about "life". It is like being in an introvert's head. I liked it but some may not. BTW,although you may feel nothing will happen, something rather wrenching and shocking does. Set in England. 197 pp.
Here's more which I did not write: In a deeply compelling debut novel, Lee Rourke—a British underground sensation for his story collection Everyday—tells the tale of a man who finds his life so boring it frightens him. So he quits his job to spend some time sitting on a bench beside a quiet canal in a placid London neighborhood, watching the swans in the water and the people in the glass-fronted offices across the way while he collects himself.
However his solace is soon interrupted when
Here's more which I did not write: In a deeply compelling debut novel, Lee Rourke—a British underground sensation for his story collection Everyday—tells the tale of a man who finds his life so boring it frightens him. So he quits his job to spend some time sitting on a bench beside a quiet canal in a placid London neighborhood, watching the swans in the water and the people in the glass-fronted offices across the way while he collects himself.
However his solace is soon interrupted when
November 20, 2014
This book is like sort of like Office Space (the movie) meets The Stranger (by Camus)... and it was fantastic. Beautiful writing, thoughtful musings, and seriously on-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense... about boredom :) About time, space, living, being, feeling, and doing (or not doing). Really fantastic!
As usual, how I got the book and and where I read it impacted my reading experience. Although it doesn't take place in Amsterdam, I thought it appropriate that I bought it there. And the way I read it was interesting, too -- almost entirely on the tram while I was half-oblivious and half-aware of my surroundings and the flow of people getting on and off. Finally, this read has reminded me how wonderful it is to find an unknown (to me) book at a used bookstore, to be pulled in without any expectations, and to end up loving it. I must look into this author more.
As usual, how I got the book and and where I read it impacted my reading experience. Although it doesn't take place in Amsterdam, I thought it appropriate that I bought it there. And the way I read it was interesting, too -- almost entirely on the tram while I was half-oblivious and half-aware of my surroundings and the flow of people getting on and off. Finally, this read has reminded me how wonderful it is to find an unknown (to me) book at a used bookstore, to be pulled in without any expectations, and to end up loving it. I must look into this author more.
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