{"id":997,"date":"2010-07-29T11:27:44","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T10:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=997"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:41:43","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T18:41:43","slug":"lee-rourke-the-canal-melville-house-999-200pp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=997","title":{"rendered":"Lee Rourke, The Canal<\/em> (Melville House) \u00a39.99"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rourke\u2019s novel is set on a stretch of the Regent Canal between Hackney and Islington, a symbolic hinterland between Old London and New Labour\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Although it\u2019s 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\u2019s not very much to see and the dialogue too frequently slips into portentousness of the kind where people make statements like \u2018Money affords them the lifestyle they need\u2019 and \u2018Somehow, we have to invent our own reality. We have to make the real unreal. It\u2019s interesting to note that a sizable minority of extremists are recent converts.\u2019 etc. This is dialogue as essay, of a writer in love with their ideas, not dialogue as words that come out of people\u2019s mouths.<\/p>\n

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When this dialogue is added to the narrator\u2019s uncanny ability to \u2018instantly\u2019 think of world events such as 9\/11 and to throw in arcane pieces of knowledge whenever the fancy takes him, it\u2019s hard to avoid the sensation that this is not a novel you\u2019re 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\u2019t make you cringe, and characters need to engage our interest even if they don\u2019t create sympathy. Reading this, one thinks of Camus\u2019 Meursault or Ballard\u2019s later narrators, and wishes that Rourke\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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There is little doubt that Rourke strains to be a philosophical novelist, but in the end, The Canal<\/em> 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\u2019s hand. Unfortunately, it shows few traces of its editor\u2019s. This is the most sloppily edited book I\u2019ve read in a long time. One can possibly forgive an occasional slip such as \u2018a new future had be revealed to me\u2019 or tautologies like \u2018male cob\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rourke\u2019s novel is set on a stretch of the Regent Canal between Hackney and Islington, a symbolic hinterland between Old London and New Labour\u2019s London. 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