A few weeks ago in London, I met up with Mike and Rion near their apartment in Hackney. We walked next to Regent's Canal for awhile, before heading towards Broadway market and London Fields (where we sat and ate bánh mì and cupcakes). The canal, I was surprised to find, is a British twin to the Canal St Martin, the neighborhoods comparably bobo and gentrifying, the down-at-heel and the upwardly mobile jockeying for precedence. I felt a strange sensation of being somewhere familiar but also totally
foreign to me. (This often happens to me in England.)

We stopped for awhile to watch a water spaniel swim around chasing ducks; it was a sunny afternoon in the middle of a heat wave and Rion slathered sunblock all over Dante. What struck me most was that unlike the Canal St Martin, the water in this canal was lucid; we could see down to the shallow bottom, where an immense amount of debris had gathered.  It was in such a state of decomposition I could barely distinguish what these items had originally been before they formed this underwater carnage: television sets, old boots, a few tires, bits of plastic and rubber and metal, laying there covered by the seasick green water. 

By some happy accident, that same week I was sent a review copy of Lee Rourke’s new novel, The Canal, set on that same stretch of towpath where we had dodged cyclists only days before. And just as Regent's Canal reminds me of our Parisian canal, so does The Canal remind me of a French novel– the imagery, the construction, the language is all very tight, very unified; there's something very Camus about it. Rourke picks up certain images– signage, geese, swans, office
workers– and dwells on them, like staring at the surface of the canal
to see what's underneath; the language stalls in loops of reruns, or is blandly clichéd, so that occasoinally bits of it stick out, like debris breaking through the stilled surface.

His hero, or anti-hero, who remains nameless throughout the text, is in a state of complete boredom. Having quit his job, he now comes to the canal every day to sit on a bench and"simply watch it all go by." As Rourke writes in the prologue:

"Some people think that boredom is a bad thing, that it should be avoided, that we should fill our lives with other stuff in order to keep it at bay.  I don't.  I think boredom is a good thing; it shapes us; it moves us. Boredom is powerful. It should never be avoided.  In fact, I think boredom should be embraced. It is the power of everyday boredom that compels people to do things–even if that something is nothing."

It's quite daring to attempt to write about boredom so directly– it's running the risk, of course, that the reader will decide he is too bored reading about someone else's boredom to continue with the book.  But what Rourke produces is an extremely urban text, through which a 21st century experience of the city, but particularly
of London, is refracted.  It is a meditation not only on boredom, but on desire– both are impulses, Rourke tells us, breaking through our surfaces.  Boredom, in The Canal, can be a state of enlightenment:

"Those who are bored and, more importantly, embrace their boredom, have a far clearer perspective on a) themselves and b) those around them.  Those who are not bored are merely lost in superfluous activity: fashion, lifestyle, TV, drink, drugs, technology, et cetera–the usual things we use to pass the time. The irony being that they are just as bored as I am, only they think they're not because they are continually doing something. And what they are doing is battling boredom, which is a losing battle."

The novel is as much about technology as it is about boredom– “‘We need something more, we need that added extra in life.  Technology
provides all we need…It is an extension.  That’s all.  Part of us’”–  but it’s also about the mirroring,
pairing, and intersecting of technology and nature, the human and
the animal, the machine and the human. And technology comes to figure as a trope at once for the unique wonder of it– the narrator is fixated on aircraft making their way towards Heathrow, and also with a video game of his youth– and for the deadening progress and repetition of it (the "snazzy flat screen monitors" in an office that can be seen from the canal).

Rourke has noticed the debris as well; the narrator spends much of the novel waiting for the dredgers to come and clean it out.  But the canal does not linger on like some Beckettian, unchanging space, suspended in unreality; things shift, change, develop, as they do tend to do in cities. We need spaces where things can happen, Rourke says in the novel, in order to feel real; “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.” In its quiet, unannounced way, The Canal does just that.