The blurbs tell me Falling Hour is a novel. That depends on what you mean by a novel. If by novel you mean an extended stretch of writing through which the consciousness communicating with the reader (for convenience, let’s call this consciousness the narrator) is a person who doesn’t share the author’s name, then I suppose this qualifies as a novel. Two thirds the way through Falling Hour, the narrator reveals to us that they go by the name Hugh Dalgarno which, since it doesn’t coincide with Geoffrey Morrison’s name, means that at the very least the narrator is a fictional projection, a character, a figment of the author’s imagination. But if by novel you mean a made-up plot-driven story that follows a narrative arc of conflict to climax to resolution to denouement and closure, or some variation of that arc, then maybe not. Instead, we have something simpler. Our narrator named Hugh has found a grey picture frame and offers it for sale online and arranges to meet a prospective buyer in a park; he waits in the park for a person who never shows up, and as he waits his mind wanders. The book (which the blurb-writers have taken to calling a novel) discloses the mind’s wanderings. Herein lies the book’s charm. It’s as if the reader is walking through the park and stumbles upon the narrator, and, sitting beside him on the bench, strikes up a conversation which gives occasion for the narrator to share his mind’s rambling. And that is the novel.
If there is conflict at all in the novel, it’s the conflict between the frame and the rambling. As a practiced street photographer, I’m familiar with and sympathetic to both sides of this conflict. On the one side, I carry a camera with me most everywhere I go and, when the opportunity presents itself, I use my camera to frame an image. If a scene looks promising, I press one eye to the viewfinder and see what falls within the bounds defined by the laws of optics. On the other side lies the fact that none of this could happen if I didn’t wander. I meander through the streets of my hometown and chase light and all the things it decorates, and that meandering makes me ever mindful of all that never falls within my frame. Even when I do capture something within my frame, there are leakages into the wider world, the trailing foot of a passer-by who slipped the frame before I pressed the shutter release, half a cloud chasing the other half beyond the reach of my sensor, light trails that trace the path of a car long gone.
Hugh’s picture frame isn’t quite the same thing, but it functions in the same way. It offers an arbitrary limit to the visual field and signals that we will treat what lies within its bounds differently than all the extraneous stuff. We do the same thing with novels. We have vague rules that determine what gets to go inside the bounds of a novel and how we should interpret it. What should we do, then, with Hugh’s frame, which he found slung over a fire hydrant, and which he now drags with him through a park, at one point setting it down so that a snail can ooze its way from outside the frame and into the formal arrangement that is the framed picture? Like my meandering on photo walks, Hugh’s conversational meandering seems to work at cross purposes to his framing.
Our friendly narrator has a tendency to pathologize his own habits, worrying that maybe his brain is broken, that he is a “brain victim of the aesthetic sphere.” He wonders if maybe the breakage has been caused by “the mind virus of total skepticism.” As he observes of himself: “From childhood I have tended to get stuck within the spirals in my own head.” He suspects that he is “a permanent member of the confused men of the earth” (as opposed to being simply Scottish by ancestry). It doesn’t surprise us, then, that he pathologizes his own body, too: “…whatever the observer would think about me from my appearance, the world I inhabited inside myself was male, female, and neither all at once, and had been so at least since adolescence….” It doesn’t take much of a leap to think of words in a book as a metaphor for a spirit embodied, and if the body that does that embodying resists categorization, then it shouldn’t surprise us that the book draws some of this categorical confusion to itself, too. It isn’t until the book is well underway that it finally decides it might be a fiction, and so our narrator drops this vaguely amusing pronouncement: “now that I have decided that this is a story, I feel certain obligations not to stray.” I say “vaguely amusing” because, in the spirit of Tristram Shandy, the only thing our narrator knows how to do is stray. That is his superpower.
One way a book can leak beyond its neatly circumscribed frame is to place itself in conversation with other books. (As John Donne never said: No book is an island.) Sometimes Morrison does this tacitly. We can’t help, for example, but draw comparisons to other writers who engage a similarly curious, free-wheeling, aleatory style. I think of the non-fiction of Olivia Laing and of Geoff Dyer, both of whom dabble successfully in novel writing too. A quality one finds in both of them is a willingness to set aside personal agendas, a suspension of the didactic mode or what, in more aggressive moments, I like to call a yearning to colonize the reader’s mind; instead, to follow the text wherever it leads. Perhaps the first to eschew the customary linear, rational, testicular style was Virginia Woolf, followed by a handful of others, like Marilynne Robinson. But these are exceptions, the writers who don’t set out to say anything in particular, yet communicate so much.
At other times, Morrison is more explicit when he draws other writing into the conversation. The first of these is John Keats whom he (or his narrator) revisits throughout the book. He begins by reflecting on the truth/beauty line that concludes Ode on a Grecian Urn and asks “what possessed this man to write something so obviously wrong.” Hugh clearly has a love/hate relationship with the romantic poet which might be summed up by a line he uses later in the novel in a different context when he speaks of “[t]he fog of words at war with one another across the pages of ancient and modern books.” While Hugh clearly admires the poet, he can never forgive him his trip to Scotland with his travelling companion, Charles Brown, in 1818. The pair went to Scotland to pay homage to Robert Burns, but couldn’t help but carry with them a certain English hauteur. I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to use a French word to convey a sense of English colonial disdain, but I’ll risk the faux pas since the French have much better ways than the English for conveying disdain. Says Hugh:
[H]is remarks about Burns are both the proprietary feelings of the ‘fan’ and the patronizing dismissals of a young writer who has used an older model as a stepstool in his mind. So that when Keats, the young pirate, comes to Burns’s cottage, by then a tourist site, he is dismayed to find the keeper ‘a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew Burns,’ adding that he ‘ought to be kicked for having spoken to him.’ This is a theme. Keats wants Burns without Scotland and Scottish people, and especially without poor ones.
It’s hard to make sense of Hugh’s near contempt for Keats until we learn that Hugh’s own ancestors were Scottish and victims of the Clearances. I know something of what Hugh is on about. My mother (a Duncanson) tells a story which, when I first heard it, horrified me. When she was a little girl, growing up on a farm in southwestern Ontario, her grandmother (a McRae) took her aside one day and explained to her that her mother (a Paine) was trash because she was English. Imagine telling your granddaughter that her mother is trash! When I first heard this bit of family lore, I didn’t know anything about the Highland Clearances and I didn’t understand that my mother’s family ended up in Canada because they’d been forced off their land by the English. (This may or may not be true.) More to the point, I didn’t understand how this sort of trauma echoes down the generations. But the lingering question in connection with Keats is whether we can read his works in isolation from his place in the tapestry of English Imperialism.
Later in the novel, Hugh introduces the image of the river which offers an alternate way of thinking about larger literary conversations. He speaks of the river as “an image of thinking” and as a “causeway of history” and these two notions lead him inevitably to “stream of consciousness” where he becomes aware of himself as a mind in the act of thinking. No mention of “stream of consciousness” can happen without mention of James Joyce and then Virginia Woolf, and by a strange unwritten law, no mention of Virginia Woolf can happen without mention of her final wander into the River Ouse, and no mention of the River Ouse can happen (or so I’ve come to believe) without mention of Olivia Laing’s To The River which Hugh doesn’t mention but which is there, lurking under the surface. The point, I guess—not that one needs a point when talking about “stream of consciousness”—is that if you (either as narrator or as reader) release yourself to a wider flow of words, if you open yourself to linguistic channels that transcend your particular well worn grooves, you may find yourself drifting through fresh waters to unexpected places. That is acutely so when reading Falling Hour, which observes itself in the act of exploring its own limits, like a person pinching their own skin, or a snail oozing beyond a picture frame, and on finding that those limits are arbitrary, perhaps illusory, takes the reader to the edge of their own self-aware universe and gives a gentle nudge.
Very well-written review of a singular novel. Thank you!