proustitute

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 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.