Rourke’s novel is set on a stretch of the Regent Canal between Hackney and Islington, a symbolic hinterland between Old London and New Labour’s London. Its unnamed narrator, having recently resigned from his job, returns daily to the same bench and watches the swans and the coots and the slick-suited workers going about their business in the office opposite. This is all part of his embrace of boredom as a liberating and energising force, but it is disrupted by the arrival of a woman, again unnamed, who stares in the same direction. From here, the novel descends into a (largely predictable) double plot strand, of whether or not the narrator will seduce the woman, and the revelation of why the woman stares so intently at the office opposite, with the occasional intervention of a gang of youths from the local estate who push the novel towards its final moment of violence.
Although it’s brave to set a novel in a very limited space and with an equally limited cast of characters, the problems of this approach soon become apparent. The only things the characters can really do, given that seduction would ruin a plot strand, are watch and talk, but there’s not very much to see and the dialogue too frequently slips into portentousness of the kind where people make statements like ‘Money affords them the lifestyle they need’ and ‘Somehow, we have to invent our own reality. We have to make the real unreal. It’s interesting to note that a sizable minority of extremists are recent converts.’ etc. This is dialogue as essay, of a writer in love with their ideas, not dialogue as words that come out of people’s mouths.
When this dialogue is added to the narrator’s uncanny ability to ‘instantly’ think of world events such as 9/11 and to throw in arcane pieces of knowledge whenever the fancy takes him, it’s hard to avoid the sensation that this is not a novel you’re reading, but an attempt to say something deep and meaningful. There is, of course, a longstanding and valuable tradition of novels of ideas, but a novel of ideas still needs to be a novel: there may not be much of a plot, but the dialogue can’t make you cringe, and characters need to engage our interest even if they don’t create sympathy. Reading this, one thinks of Camus’ Meursault or Ballard’s later narrators, and wishes that Rourke’s flimsy narrator had any of their signs of life. Instead, we get a character whose every idea and response feels hackneyed (Hackneyed?), and whose fate quickly ceases to interest us.
There is little doubt that Rourke strains to be a philosophical novelist, but in the end, The Canal bears the same relation to more successful novels of ideas as a canal bears to a river: it may look similar at first glance, but it lacks the powerful currents and the beauty, and shows traces everywhere of its maker’s hand. Unfortunately, it shows few traces of its editor’s. This is the most sloppily edited book I’ve read in a long time. One can possibly forgive an occasional slip such as ‘a new future had be revealed to me’ or tautologies like ‘male cob’, but any more than one starts to look clumsy, and when you find a sentence that ends with both a comma and a full stop, you have to ask what the editor, author and proofreader were doing to miss it. Then again, perhaps they were just too bored to notice.