Lee Rourke

One way to look at The Canal is: It's awful. And this might be the right way to look at The Canal, because in some ways it really is awful. It's a book about a dullish jerkhole who quits his job to indulge in juvenile philosophizing and also pursue a woman who repeatedly tells him that she is not interested.

But there are other ways to view this novel that are potentially interesting.

For example: The Canal is a very boring novel about boredom. And that's perfect, isn't it? You are forced, show more by reading the book, to experience the very sensation the protagonist meditates upon so dully (Here is a typical yawner: "It is obvious to me now that most acts of violence are caused by those who are truly bored. And as our world becomes increasingly boring, as the future progresses into a quagmire of nothingness, our world will become increasingly more violent.").

The Canal might be about boredom as receptiveness, as a passive acceptance of chance and chance events. A few other reviews have commented on the fact that, though the book purports to be about boredom, soon after it starts things start happening.

But these events never hook the characters into an actual story; there is repetition, but no development. Characters remain like icebergs, submerged and isolated. The narrator, in particular, is determined to be bored, which also means unengaged.

Rourke also uses his premise as an excuse. He portrays the narrator as an excruciatingly shallow personality who acts without discernable motivation. Much of the book revolves around his obsession with a woman to whom he's only marginally attracted. His attraction persists despite the fact that he finds her character repulsive, and despite her rebuffs he approaches her in increasingly aggressive, creepy, ultimately frightening ways. Why? Because he's bored and boredom leads to violence? Because she's there?

OK, sure, he's an avatar of boredom - hallucinatory, violent, complacent. But what about the other characters? The woman? The street gang? All of the characters may as well be robots running the same program. None of them are even slightly human.

The only times I felt connected to the book were the few moments when random strangers would pop on stage to shout at the narrator: What are you doing! Go away! And I knew that if I were a character in the novel, I'd be one of those people.

Those momentary intrusions suggest that the author has at least a modicum of self-awareness. But even if The Canal was occasionally interesting, I wouldn't call it good. I mean, really. Can any book be good when it fetishizes a woman who mixes blood into her paintings and then declares unironically: "I paint because I will one day die. Because I want to die. Because I hate myself. Each time I destroy one of my paintings I am destroying a part of myself. I am a cliché and I like it that way."?

I don't think so.

Note: I received a free electronic copy of The Canal from Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

“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:

“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

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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. show less