The Canal by Lee RourkeMelville House, 2010

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:

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)

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