Geoffrey D. Morrison's ​Falling Hour

Reviewed by Peter Szuban

(Coach House Books, 2023)

Geoffrey D. Morrison’s debut novel Falling Hour jumps into the mind of one Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, as he sits in an anonymous park in an anonymous city in a not so anonymous Canada. Like a melded Vladimir and Estragon, he patiently awaits a potential buyer for his picture frame while sifting through his memories of different persons, places, and events, often through the prism of cultural artifacts ranging from books to films to songs. He feels alienated from the world around him, and in his own words has a “broken brain.” He’s looking to come to some sort of understanding about himself and the world around him.

He is looking to make a connection. 
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The drive towards connection is the engine of Falling Hour, both in Hugh’s reason for being in the park and in the way the narrative unfolds, jumping between different moments and ideas in a series of connective associations that resist a linear progression of thoughts that once represented Hugh’s own thought process:

To put it simply, I had begun to think my brain was broken. My thoughts no longer had the geometric neatness I was sure they used to, the reliable line of yellow dashes down the middle, of the road: ‘and then, and then, and then…’ Now thinking was more like trying to keep a fistful of optical fibres together in one hand while the other was tied behind my back, powerless therefore to stop the strands from splitting away from their neighbours in a superfine fray.

Hugh is troubled by this shift in his thought process, declaring that his “brain was broken” and that his thoughts “no longer had the geometric neatness” he ascribes to a linear progression of thinking that once represented his own. The image of the road, necessary infrastructure connecting one “then” to another, thereby suggesting a recognizable succession of events that constitute a human life, is now alien to Hugh, who finds his thoughts bunched together like “optical fibres” and splitting away from each other in a non-linear fray.

Hugh’s thoughts, and by extension Hugh himself, are displaced in space and time, no longer following each other in a series of “and then, and then,” and leaving Hugh to ponder how to navigate this new way of thinking in a world actively hostile to it. The image of the road serves as a counterpoint to Hugh’s current form of thinking, both in representing how he used to think and in how the logic ordering the world around him creates sets of linear tasks for human life.  A road is for movement and relentless progression, associated with infrastructure and capital. It is a not a safe space to sit and think.

Hugh’s reflections suggest a cruelty behind this linear progression of thoughts, drawing associations between it and a ruthless ordering of life enabled by power. Whether it be a bourgeoise suburban family dictating what behaviour constitutes as normal and acceptable, or the Scottish immigrants who instituted Canada’s colonial and discriminatory governmental policies that privileged a white Protestant nationalism over everyone else, Hugh finds the world he inhabits hostile to other ways of being and thinking. He embraces Marxism as a coping measure, although his contributions amount to financial support rather than active organizing, indicating that this ideology is curtailed by the same capitalistic linear progression of orders that govern Canada. It’s a world that remains hostile to the connections Hugh longs for.
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This hostility comes early. Hugh recounts a scene from his childhood that suggests the antagonism of the world around him to any form of behaviour or form of connecting that is aberrant to the succession of “thens” expected of a middle-class Canadian family:

​All this to say that Joshua, the oldest boy, scared me—scared me with his sharp elbows, his backwards cap, his love, slightly ahead of the curve, of terrible proto-nu-metal bands that sounded like wailing souls in hell. We heard them all day from his open bedroom window, saw posters of scowling bald men on his walls. In the days when the Hawerchuks kept their blinds open, that is. Because of course a moment came when my great-aunt and I were caught watching them, and the Hawerchuck world ended forever. I cannot exactly say when they noticed—they may have always quietly known, deep down, and only decided to act when the rattle and knock of that knowledge in the background of their lives became unbearable to them. All I know is that starting sometime in early June, the blinds of the Hawerchuk windows would close practically all at once whenever my great-aunt or I went out on the back balcony to sweep the cedar leaves. This had a powerful shaming effect all on its own, but I felt worse once the stories made it to school.

In a scenario popularized by films such as Rear Window, Hugh is caught observing his neighbours, and experiences a feeling of shame coupled with further social ostracization at school. Nevertheless, unlike the archetypal scene of observing someone in a private space without the observed’s knowledge, Hugh’s observation of the Hawerchuck family occurs in the company of his great-aunt, and is born out of a growing class awareness rather than lurid fascination. Harkening to Hugh’s digression on the pivotal opening scene with Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation, Hugh is observing the Hawerchucks much as a detective in search of clues. He is attempting to solve the mystery of his own alienation.

He notes the differences in the oldest Hawerchuck boy, named Joshua, in dress, musical taste, home rituals, and attitudes, and is drawn in by characteristics that ultimately scare Hugh, alien as they are to his own upbringing as a Calvinist immigrant. Joshua is of the Canadian middle-class suburbanites, engaging in a culture that evokes the countercultural working-class ethos of punk and metal music, but is already being co-opted by him and those Canadian teenagers like him who belong to the middle class.

This isn’t peeping on an undressing or murdering neighbour, but a comparison of class and social difference. For Hugh, the shame too comes less so from being found out, than from the material consequences at school where Hugh’s ostracization is heightened, and his difference from his peers reinforced. The pain Hugh feels is at the reaction of his peers in perceiving a difference in him, rather than being found indulging in a forbidden pleasure. What is forbidden here is the acknowledgment of a difference in class and culture, with the Hawerchucks holding on to their own traditions of Orthodox Easter even as they live out a Canadian middle-class existence.

Hugh’s great-aunt’s involvement in the observation further establishes the class interest in this comparison. In the navigation of difference, the middle-class family remains a spectacle for new immigrants and is something for them to measure themselves against. It’s an interest not individual to Hugh, suggesting that his interest is based upon his membership in this new immigrant class come to Canada. And it is through these sets of non-linear observations, comparisons, and reflections that Hugh wrestles with his own alienation and attempts to identify its causes.

As for remedies, Hugh finds solace in family stories, in old songs, and in nature. He traces genealogies in his head, suggesting both family trees and the philosophical method of Friedrich Nietzsche and later period Michel Foucault. He thinks of old poems, old songs, old family proletariat non-landlord ways of thinking, sees a black bird, reflects on art and on history and on his own upbringing. He thinks. 
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But are these remedies? The narrative is ambivalent, even as its hypnotic prose style draws the reader into its non-linear frays with its lyrical cadence:

Yes, there was a kind of Arthurian symmetry to it, to end my vigil more or less as it had begun, to throw the frame into the dark pond and hope for a hand to reach out of the waters and catch it. Arthur the Welsh king who the English had claimed as their own with help from Geoffrey of Monmouth, a was-he-or-wasn’t-he – maybe Welsh, maybe just another Norman franchisee.

Hugh retreats into literature, using the Arthurian legend of Arthur’s departure to make peace with the absence of the frame buyer. This brings a poetic beauty to his situation, even as the purpose of his waiting has seemingly been thwarted. The image of Arthur’s return is one of hope, but complicated by the English’s co-opting of the tale from the Welsh and the uncertainty of Arthur’s return. This Geoffrey of Monmouth is another source of suspicion for Hugh, highlighting the conflicting role of an author of a tale, “franchisee” relating to a self-serving financial benefit. The scene of Arthur’s departure comes after a civil war that spells the end of King Arthur’s court and King Arthur himself, gravely wounded in his fight with his own son Mordred.

The promise of renewal and Arthur’s return gestures towards a world that has healed of the wounds of history. It is only that, a promise. And the narration again and again throws these linear narratives’ progress and renewal into question.
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Hugh is hounded by self-doubt, mistrusting his reading of situations and history because of his previously held truths, which he now he recognizes as products of his environment and in need of questioning:

​We self-taught so often misread the situation or, worse, we begin to see with our enemies’ eyes. So that while it was ironic I found Woolf first it was also practically inevitable. As a boy one of my prized possessions was an illustrated history of the world – all of it, all the history or so I thought, and more or less from the beginning. I was at its mercy.

For Hugh, being “self-taught” is a stand-in for his alienation, which provides the groundwork for his self-doubt and misunderstanding. He professes an early love of Virginia Woolf that was later complicated by his burgeoning class consciousness. He fears seeing “with our enemies’ eyes,” taking on the values of a class that looks down on everybody else. He recognizes his own alienation in that of James Joyce, and the oppressor class in Woolf’s condemnation of Joyce’s Ulysses in her journals. Woolf’s critique in her diaries indicates a distrust of Joyce based on class grounds. That these dairies were initially private writing, and therefore the privileged thoughts of their author, lends them an authoritative intentionality and glimpse into another, privileged world, much like the Hawerchuk window.

Woolf’s judgement of Joyce highlights the necessity of suspicion, a question of the presentation of information and its motives. Here, knowledge of Woolf aligns with knowledge of the Hawerchucks. That Hugh grew up with these initial packets of information, took pride and pleasure in his knowledge of them, and then learnt to fiercely question them, has unmoored him. He now seeks other understandings, even as he reels from the power of those initial narratives and how they managed to shape him and his understanding of the world. He reaches into his own past, uneasily, relying on folksongs, nature, and the stories that his great-aunt and great-uncle told him.
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All this analysis isn’t necessary to enjoy Falling Hour. The novel is thoughtful and true, inspiring reflections on what it means to be Canadian today.  It wrestles with Canadian history and identity, how ideology shapes who we are. It deploys an army of images, metaphors, allusions, digressions, and references to interrogate Hugh’s alienation as narrated by Hugh himself. But, none of this is necessary to enjoy the novel on its own terms with its inviting prose style and humour. The novel sings, much like the old songs Hugh remembers. There’s magic in the words of it. 

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​Peter Szuban is a writer living in Toronto, Ontario—a city built on Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat, and Mississaugas of New Credit land. He works in archives and has an MA degree in English from Western University and an MI degree from the University of Toronto. His work has previously appeared in The Ex-Puritan and PRISM international.