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Falling Hour
All talk, no action: The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut
It's a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel's letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres.
These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.
"From the first page to the last I felt wholly captivated by Falling Hour and Hugh's sensitive and far-ranging digressions. Morrison has captured the magic of Sebald and made it entirely his own, a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a "fake" country. " - Andr� Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn
"Falling Hour is a profound incantatory exhalation - a quiet triumph; to read it is to engage in a smart, humane and at times very funny conversation that you will never want to end." - Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon
"A stellar debut novel by a stellar new talent. Falling Hour is written in a prose style that enlivens every page." - Mauro Javier C�rdenas, author of Aphasia: A Novel
It's a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel's letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres.
These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.
"From the first page to the last I felt wholly captivated by Falling Hour and Hugh's sensitive and far-ranging digressions. Morrison has captured the magic of Sebald and made it entirely his own, a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a "fake" country. " - Andr� Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn
"Falling Hour is a profound incantatory exhalation - a quiet triumph; to read it is to engage in a smart, humane and at times very funny conversation that you will never want to end." - Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon
"A stellar debut novel by a stellar new talent. Falling Hour is written in a prose style that enlivens every page." - Mauro Javier C�rdenas, author of Aphasia: A Novel
224 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 7, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
August 4, 2023
Ahh I didn't realize novels could do this.
I mean yeah, sure, I knew they could all those things discretely, on their own, but I didn't realize you could have a lofty novel like this that's both full of ideas and also deeply relevant. I really truly think this might be that most elusive thing: a great millennial piece of art. a worthy member of the canlit canon, at the absolute very least. The problem though is that the book is so full of ideas that it's hard to summarize, hard to champion.
So please, if you are reading this message go find Morrison's novel and give it a read.
I mean yeah, sure, I knew they could all those things discretely, on their own, but I didn't realize you could have a lofty novel like this that's both full of ideas and also deeply relevant. I really truly think this might be that most elusive thing: a great millennial piece of art. a worthy member of the canlit canon, at the absolute very least. The problem though is that the book is so full of ideas that it's hard to summarize, hard to champion.
So please, if you are reading this message go find Morrison's novel and give it a read.
May 27, 2023
I would continue the chain of signs, the hand-over-hand movement of strands in the inner darkness that the kids playing ring toss had begun the other day by finding or stealing the frame and leaving it hanging around a fire hydrant in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood. A red fire hydrant, by the way. Red-winged blackbirds are often found near water. Like willows. The willow I had seen by the wet red sweater. All of it somehow connected. And I would find the bird and view it through the frame and perhaps for a moment the strands and fibres would make a clear picture and people would come to the park for something other than running or walking their dogs and the limited-run luxury streetwear industry would justly implode and the workers without work in the suffering inland post-industrial towns would occupy the empty factories and make things people needed and distribute them in free communistic exchange without recourse to the value-form. Or perhaps my greatest hopes would not be realized but at least, at least, the picture I wove from the strands of the day would be clear.
One should not be too influenced by blurbs, but Geoffrey D. Morrison's Falling Hour comes with commendations from three of my top 10 contemporary writers, whose brilliant novels resonate with my own taste: Jen Craig, Mauro Javier Cardenas and Simon Okotie.
The novel takes it's title from Milton's Paradise lost, a section the narrator argues is the most modern moment, the most far-seeing moment, the moment that as far as I am concerned secured the place of this poem among the ages:
The novel opens in 2019 with our early-30s narrator in a strangely (Sebaldianly?) deserted park in a town in Ontario on a swelteringly hot day.
He is clutching an empty picture frame he had found slung over a fire hydrant, which he hopes to sell to an anonymous bidder, having advertised it for sale. In the distance he hears a distinctive bird call, one that had intrigued him for many years, speculating what exotic species might produce the sound, until he one day found that the bird concerned was the red-winged blackbird, possibly most abundant living land bird in North America.
A blackbird seen through the frame (a scene in the novel) courtesy of Dall-E:
As he waits, and the hours pass (in non-linear fashion) his thoughts stray in various directions - from Gene Hackman movies, to the CIA, arbutus trees, Scottish Calvinism and much more, with Scottish/Irish folk songs and the work of John Keats, who he admires for his poetry and abhors for his English snobbery, running themes.
This could be another of the genre of modern Sebaldian/Wiki novels but this takes that into a distinctive new direction. The narrator's thoughts are simulteneously structured and troubled, personal and political, the different strands, fibres as he calls them, symptoms of a broken mind:
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, 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. A hundred dancing glows, like angel-dusted heads of pins: each one possible, each one possibly important, each one with the power to cancel out all the others if I dared let it veer far enough away on its own.
This is an erudite, political, moving yet at times very funny, novel. However, I did have a personal reservation with the novel. I introduced Mauro Javier Cardenas's Aphasia as "If I imagined the perfect novel for me, what might it be?" concluding "I don't need to imagine this book - I've just read it."
Here the book almost felt like an anti-Paul novel! The narrator is anti-English, anti middle-class, anti-capitalist and anti-Christian, and I either am, or am pro, all those things. Indeed he even has a go at “Boring corporate” referring here to the old parasitic rent-collecting industries, to insurance, accounting, ‘solutions’ - I've made my career in insurance solutions, including a stint at an accounting firm (although as an actuary).
Indeed I almost felt seen - not in a good way. The house palette of my current insurance solutions employer include Sea Foam and Coral, two packaged colours that draw the narrator's particular, almost Bernhardian, ire as he looks at the shades of green in the park:
Though through no fault of nature's, this green also tended somehow to fakeness in my mind, to the electric lime and neon green, of candy packaging and energy drinks, the radium cousins to the near-white ghost green of things that glow in the dark. Which was cousin itself, I supposed, to seafoam, which no plant I knew of bore, let alone the foam of the sea. True foam of the sea was a white shot with yellow-brown sodium, churned ancient ivory, or at least it was so when it foamed at the crest of the waves coming in from any sea I had ever seen.
...
I made a sharp distinction in my mind between this wild grass green and the deeper, darker green of expensive lawns. Those lawns were not grass. They were close-bladed, plump, like a cake for some reason. I do not know why but expensive lawns made me think of a cake. More fake in its way even than seafoam, a colour that if not present in the green around me here under the trees or the foam of the actual sea must surely be somewhere in nature — perhaps on the back of a tropical bird or the spots of a fish in a coral reef. Well, the less said about the coral reefs the better. But the minds of the people who had chosen to care about plump and dark green cakes of lawns, the whole vision of the world it implied, did not seem unrelated to the sickness that was making the reefs go away. How could they not be? It had not escaped my notice, as at least nominally a very unimportant member of the 'fashion industry; that the 'colour of the year' for this year, as selected by a company whose service appeared to be the selecting of colours and nothing else, was 'living coral,' the colour of a reef in pink health. These people could make a decoration of anything they had seen to it would die.
4 stars - though 5 for literary merit.
One should not be too influenced by blurbs, but Geoffrey D. Morrison's Falling Hour comes with commendations from three of my top 10 contemporary writers, whose brilliant novels resonate with my own taste: Jen Craig, Mauro Javier Cardenas and Simon Okotie.
The novel takes it's title from Milton's Paradise lost, a section the narrator argues is the most modern moment, the most far-seeing moment, the moment that as far as I am concerned secured the place of this poem among the ages:
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous clouds
Instinct with fire and nitre hurried him
As many miles aloft.
The novel opens in 2019 with our early-30s narrator in a strangely (Sebaldianly?) deserted park in a town in Ontario on a swelteringly hot day.
He is clutching an empty picture frame he had found slung over a fire hydrant, which he hopes to sell to an anonymous bidder, having advertised it for sale. In the distance he hears a distinctive bird call, one that had intrigued him for many years, speculating what exotic species might produce the sound, until he one day found that the bird concerned was the red-winged blackbird, possibly most abundant living land bird in North America.
A blackbird seen through the frame (a scene in the novel) courtesy of Dall-E:
As he waits, and the hours pass (in non-linear fashion) his thoughts stray in various directions - from Gene Hackman movies, to the CIA, arbutus trees, Scottish Calvinism and much more, with Scottish/Irish folk songs and the work of John Keats, who he admires for his poetry and abhors for his English snobbery, running themes.
This could be another of the genre of modern Sebaldian/Wiki novels but this takes that into a distinctive new direction. The narrator's thoughts are simulteneously structured and troubled, personal and political, the different strands, fibres as he calls them, symptoms of a broken mind:
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, 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. A hundred dancing glows, like angel-dusted heads of pins: each one possible, each one possibly important, each one with the power to cancel out all the others if I dared let it veer far enough away on its own.
This is an erudite, political, moving yet at times very funny, novel. However, I did have a personal reservation with the novel. I introduced Mauro Javier Cardenas's Aphasia as "If I imagined the perfect novel for me, what might it be?" concluding "I don't need to imagine this book - I've just read it."
Here the book almost felt like an anti-Paul novel! The narrator is anti-English, anti middle-class, anti-capitalist and anti-Christian, and I either am, or am pro, all those things. Indeed he even has a go at “Boring corporate” referring here to the old parasitic rent-collecting industries, to insurance, accounting, ‘solutions’ - I've made my career in insurance solutions, including a stint at an accounting firm (although as an actuary).
Indeed I almost felt seen - not in a good way. The house palette of my current insurance solutions employer include Sea Foam and Coral, two packaged colours that draw the narrator's particular, almost Bernhardian, ire as he looks at the shades of green in the park:
Though through no fault of nature's, this green also tended somehow to fakeness in my mind, to the electric lime and neon green, of candy packaging and energy drinks, the radium cousins to the near-white ghost green of things that glow in the dark. Which was cousin itself, I supposed, to seafoam, which no plant I knew of bore, let alone the foam of the sea. True foam of the sea was a white shot with yellow-brown sodium, churned ancient ivory, or at least it was so when it foamed at the crest of the waves coming in from any sea I had ever seen.
...
I made a sharp distinction in my mind between this wild grass green and the deeper, darker green of expensive lawns. Those lawns were not grass. They were close-bladed, plump, like a cake for some reason. I do not know why but expensive lawns made me think of a cake. More fake in its way even than seafoam, a colour that if not present in the green around me here under the trees or the foam of the actual sea must surely be somewhere in nature — perhaps on the back of a tropical bird or the spots of a fish in a coral reef. Well, the less said about the coral reefs the better. But the minds of the people who had chosen to care about plump and dark green cakes of lawns, the whole vision of the world it implied, did not seem unrelated to the sickness that was making the reefs go away. How could they not be? It had not escaped my notice, as at least nominally a very unimportant member of the 'fashion industry; that the 'colour of the year' for this year, as selected by a company whose service appeared to be the selecting of colours and nothing else, was 'living coral,' the colour of a reef in pink health. These people could make a decoration of anything they had seen to it would die.
4 stars - though 5 for literary merit.
September 7, 2023
I had the pleasure of reviewing Falling Hour, published by Coach House Books (my favourite Canadian indie press), for The Rumpus recently. The full review is here, and I've pasted the opening paragraphs below.
As a child in a Vancouver park, Hugh Dalgarno first heard, “the voice of the whole green world singing to me at once—the hill, the sky, the distant trees, the black and muddy pools between their roots.” It is the call of a bird he cannot see, and so for years he is free to imagine it:
This freedom could not last. The bird began as a great, plumed, colourful creature in my mind, a peacock or a toucan or a turaco blown north from Brazil and calling forlornly in a language the other birds did not know. As I got older and came to see the unlikeliness of this, I was nevertheless sure it must be a long-legged, graceful bird like a heron or a crane.
So the great hopes of childhood are chipped away, and by the time we meet Hugh, the narrator of Falling Hour (Coach House Books), the debut novel by the Canadian writer Geoffrey D. Morrison, sitting on the grass in an Ontario park on a muggy June afternoon, he has seen the bird in question—the unremarkable, unremarkably named, and entirely common red-winged blackbird. The bird, its call, its appearance (with “epaulettes of red with gold trim, like a circus ringmaster’s,” a lovely turn of phrase), its history, its personal resonance for Hugh, form a living frame to the story that unfolds.
As a child in a Vancouver park, Hugh Dalgarno first heard, “the voice of the whole green world singing to me at once—the hill, the sky, the distant trees, the black and muddy pools between their roots.” It is the call of a bird he cannot see, and so for years he is free to imagine it:
This freedom could not last. The bird began as a great, plumed, colourful creature in my mind, a peacock or a toucan or a turaco blown north from Brazil and calling forlornly in a language the other birds did not know. As I got older and came to see the unlikeliness of this, I was nevertheless sure it must be a long-legged, graceful bird like a heron or a crane.
So the great hopes of childhood are chipped away, and by the time we meet Hugh, the narrator of Falling Hour (Coach House Books), the debut novel by the Canadian writer Geoffrey D. Morrison, sitting on the grass in an Ontario park on a muggy June afternoon, he has seen the bird in question—the unremarkable, unremarkably named, and entirely common red-winged blackbird. The bird, its call, its appearance (with “epaulettes of red with gold trim, like a circus ringmaster’s,” a lovely turn of phrase), its history, its personal resonance for Hugh, form a living frame to the story that unfolds.
July 23, 2023
Many many great lines, but my favorite is the red-winged blackbird's "black feathers with ringmaster epaulets of crimson and gold." A genuinely non-linear book, blending history, poetry, nature writing, and memoir, all in a kind of fictional suspension. Very moving and beautiful.
June 22, 2023
falling asleep hour.
November 25, 2022
where to even begin with this one! other than to say i was utterly captivated by the small, quiet world geoffrey d. morrison created for our narrator in his upcoming novel 'falling hour'. the premise of the story is simple: our narrator heads to the park near his house to sell a frame he no longer needs to someone online. however, this conceit is only the 'frame' (heh) against which the book takes place, as the entirety of the book is a stream-of-consciousness inner monologue from our narrator. his thoughts move from one to the next freely, how he is overpaid for the job he does remotely, his childhood in bc, his connection to his uk heritage (or lack thereof?), among others. spending time in this man's head lets the reader draw their own conclusions about him, while also paving a path for the reader to do their own thinking on canada's history. in author andre babyn's words, the book is a "curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a 'fake' country," which really comes across in the latter half of the book.
this review is a rambling mess, but honestly the book is too (in the best of ways). definitely check this one out when it hits shelves in the new year!
this review is a rambling mess, but honestly the book is too (in the best of ways). definitely check this one out when it hits shelves in the new year!
April 24, 2023
This gets compared by the cover blurbs to Sebald, and I'm no free-thinker: I've got it on my shelf right next to The Rings of Saturn. That's a hard standard to live up to and I'm hesitant to "frame" (joke intended) the book that way at risk of discounting Morrison's originality, but he has collected and constellated a mass of (massive) historical records that bring out the global-colonial shadows on local history; after I read The Rings of Saturn, I said that I wished there was one for everywhere in the Global North, and Falling Hour joins that company.
Other joys of the book elided by this capsule review: the sentences which slow you down to make the experience more like a day in the park; the political and moral clarity in the treatment of history, which gives an ultimately hopeful sense of possibilities; the attention to not just global histories, but also communal and personal ones, and the experiences of subjectivity they engender; and the humor!
Go out, get this book, and learn!
Other joys of the book elided by this capsule review: the sentences which slow you down to make the experience more like a day in the park; the political and moral clarity in the treatment of history, which gives an ultimately hopeful sense of possibilities; the attention to not just global histories, but also communal and personal ones, and the experiences of subjectivity they engender; and the humor!
Go out, get this book, and learn!
Read
January 6, 2023This book publishes next month. If you like well-written, introspective works that care nothing for plot, you’ll do well here.
May 1, 2025
This book put me in a bit of a slump. I've put off writing about it for some time now, but I feel ready to say what I think should be heard.
While I found the first page enticingly full of texture (the grass in the park is wet and steaming and each individual blade is "stroked harp-like by invisible fingers of air"), 'Falling Hour' wasn't worth the twenty-five dollars I spent to obtain it. It almost made me hate literature, actually. The poetic language of the first page led me to believe that the book had something more to it-- if not a story, then some meaningful message-- but beyond that first page is an obnoxious ramble that demands far too much from readers.
Though I did manage to read the whole book in full, each successive chapter proceeded to suffocate me more than the last. It did not inspire. It did not open up my soul to higher planes of existence. It brought me down, down, down into the mires of a history that no individual in their right mind can ever be properly aware of, all at once, in any given lifetime.
Countless times, I found myself wondering: How is this a novel? My asking this has nothing to do with the fact that 'Falling Hour' is plotless. There is some plotless fiction that I like. The thing is, I spent more time thinking about the nature of this book and its composition-- why it is the way it is-- than I did its substance (which is interesting, given that the purpose of fiction, in my opinion, is to allow readers to forget who or where they are, to inspire change or creation, and to encourage empathy). Instead of getting to escape my reality, I was made all the more painfully aware of my privileged existence in a "fake country" that is inevitably a part of a troubled world. It's not terrible to be reminded of this fact, but it is precisely the reason I (and most people) read books: to forget, and then remember again in a way that is humbling as opposed to nauseating.
At times, I wanted to shake the narrator, to beg him to please follow through (and not postpone until the very end) with one meaningful strand of narration or theory. I suppose his inability to do this is owing to his self-diagnosed "broken brain" or "skin of ice." Some excuse for wholly abstaining from linearity, if you ask me...
The book *was* able to hold my attention when discussing religion or Canadian nationalism. I like the bit on p. 85, when Hugh calls Canada out for being "a liberal-Methodistical state [...] prevent[ing] a fight for real socialism, real radicalism, and hushing anybody who tries to with its smothering and suffocating and rules." There's no doubting that Geoffrey is gifted in terms of his ability to trace complex historical movements, all in decent prose, but the whole thing is a tangled mess. Maybe that's the point? If it is the point (for the book to be a tangled mess) then I really do wonder what is going on at Coach House these days.
Two stars: I recognize the book has merit, but I strongly believe it could have been condensed into a short story, and been much better for it. The author can write a good sentence, but can he write a good book? I would love to see it.
While I found the first page enticingly full of texture (the grass in the park is wet and steaming and each individual blade is "stroked harp-like by invisible fingers of air"), 'Falling Hour' wasn't worth the twenty-five dollars I spent to obtain it. It almost made me hate literature, actually. The poetic language of the first page led me to believe that the book had something more to it-- if not a story, then some meaningful message-- but beyond that first page is an obnoxious ramble that demands far too much from readers.
Though I did manage to read the whole book in full, each successive chapter proceeded to suffocate me more than the last. It did not inspire. It did not open up my soul to higher planes of existence. It brought me down, down, down into the mires of a history that no individual in their right mind can ever be properly aware of, all at once, in any given lifetime.
Countless times, I found myself wondering: How is this a novel? My asking this has nothing to do with the fact that 'Falling Hour' is plotless. There is some plotless fiction that I like. The thing is, I spent more time thinking about the nature of this book and its composition-- why it is the way it is-- than I did its substance (which is interesting, given that the purpose of fiction, in my opinion, is to allow readers to forget who or where they are, to inspire change or creation, and to encourage empathy). Instead of getting to escape my reality, I was made all the more painfully aware of my privileged existence in a "fake country" that is inevitably a part of a troubled world. It's not terrible to be reminded of this fact, but it is precisely the reason I (and most people) read books: to forget, and then remember again in a way that is humbling as opposed to nauseating.
At times, I wanted to shake the narrator, to beg him to please follow through (and not postpone until the very end) with one meaningful strand of narration or theory. I suppose his inability to do this is owing to his self-diagnosed "broken brain" or "skin of ice." Some excuse for wholly abstaining from linearity, if you ask me...
The book *was* able to hold my attention when discussing religion or Canadian nationalism. I like the bit on p. 85, when Hugh calls Canada out for being "a liberal-Methodistical state [...] prevent[ing] a fight for real socialism, real radicalism, and hushing anybody who tries to with its smothering and suffocating and rules." There's no doubting that Geoffrey is gifted in terms of his ability to trace complex historical movements, all in decent prose, but the whole thing is a tangled mess. Maybe that's the point? If it is the point (for the book to be a tangled mess) then I really do wonder what is going on at Coach House these days.
Two stars: I recognize the book has merit, but I strongly believe it could have been condensed into a short story, and been much better for it. The author can write a good sentence, but can he write a good book? I would love to see it.
April 18, 2023
This book gives me hope as a neurodivergent! Maybe it IS possible to allow a book to swirl & ebb & flow to share the story in the actual way we discover it.
June 4, 2023
This book was wonderful. At times it felt uncannily like my own internal monologue had been extracted onto the page, or not exactly my own as there were many elements of it I certainly hadn't thought of before, but something at times so adjacent to it in structure as well as in the broad strokes of content that I couldn't shake the uncanny feeling.
I read it in small pieces mostly in the park in the afternoons, sometimes around sunset, and numerous times found the experience described bore strange parallels to what I was experiencing in real time. I read about the black outline of the mountains 30 minutes before the finish of a sunset as I was witnessing the very same unfold in front of me. It made for an immersive experience unlike anything I've had in working memory.
Another reviewer said this book gave them hope re: their neurodivergency and the possibility that their mode of thinking and narration could produce works of interest and value, and I felt this way as well. Morrison has done something here I've been afraid to attempt and I really value the experience I've had with it.
I read it in small pieces mostly in the park in the afternoons, sometimes around sunset, and numerous times found the experience described bore strange parallels to what I was experiencing in real time. I read about the black outline of the mountains 30 minutes before the finish of a sunset as I was witnessing the very same unfold in front of me. It made for an immersive experience unlike anything I've had in working memory.
Another reviewer said this book gave them hope re: their neurodivergency and the possibility that their mode of thinking and narration could produce works of interest and value, and I felt this way as well. Morrison has done something here I've been afraid to attempt and I really value the experience I've had with it.
January 25, 2023
I’ve been loving reading debuts lately and I really enjoyed this debut novel FALLING HOUR by Geoffrey D. Morrison. As soon as I heard this book was for fans of The Novelist by Jordan Castro (one of my fave novels of 2022!) I knew I had to read it! This is a book where the writing really shines! It’s about a man, Hugh Delgarno, and his thoughts as he spends the day in a park. There’s barely any plot as we follow Hugh’s meandering thoughts and you get deep into his psyche. He thinks about the past and his heritage. I loved the mentions of Vancouver in his past. He even mentioned the Vancouver Grizzlies which brought me right back to my childhood. The writing is superb and I especially loved the long sentences. A standout novel!
Thank you to Coach House Books for my advance review copy!
Thank you to Coach House Books for my advance review copy!
July 9, 2023
It's difficult to sum this book up in a few sentences. Hugh, the narrator of this wide ranging narrative engages his reader? listener? audience? (he is not quite certain) in the story of a strange day, in a city park seemingly cut off from all other life save that of insects and birds, marked by digressions into film appreciation, history, religion, politics, philosophy in a way that is entirely idiosyncratic, surprising and entertaining. His charming eccentricities set this book apart from other Sebaldian-style (for lack of a better word) work. Completely original with more than a few cutting Canadian observations.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/07/08/th...
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/07/08/th...
May 1, 2024
I listened to the audio book narrated by Andre Alexis. I think Alexis's reading augmented the magical expressionist painting that was the Falling Hour.
August 13, 2023
It's hard to describe why I like this book so much, and it's also not something I would really recommend to anyone I know. It's very much in the "weird litfic" category and I loved the writing from the get-go. It is a stream of consciousness and there are many tangents and observations and little clarity of what exactly is going on. But for me it all came together really well.
Summer Reading 2023: Debut Author
Summer Reading 2023: Debut Author
August 2, 2025
Lots and lots of beautiful writing here. The novel is packed with poetic sensibility. Images and subjects reoccur, echo, collide, move in and out, reconstitute, deepen, dialectically illuminate, recall, always softly, almost at a whisper. And the images are beautiful and fully realized in their aesthetic.
It’s hard to explain what exactly didn’t work for me. I guess I just didn’t buy it. I either didn’t find its subjects all that interesting or found them too abstracted. Each reoccurrence was never strong enough to stay suspended for me in the way it has to if this kind of novel is to work. It would evaporate. Not to bring in The GOAT, but I still remember images and their subsequent echoes from Rings of Saturn from when I read it 15 years ago, ya know? I didn’t believe this narrator when he had these thoughts, and found his narrative voice at once too imprecise and too self-consciously Modernist. At one point he’s talking about a philosopher, quotes them, and states that he used it as his year book quote, and I just thought Oh fuck me, here we go. Everything was too noisy and a bit contrived. Still it was pretty and very encouraging for a first go. I’ll stay tuned for what GM does in the future.
It’s hard to explain what exactly didn’t work for me. I guess I just didn’t buy it. I either didn’t find its subjects all that interesting or found them too abstracted. Each reoccurrence was never strong enough to stay suspended for me in the way it has to if this kind of novel is to work. It would evaporate. Not to bring in The GOAT, but I still remember images and their subsequent echoes from Rings of Saturn from when I read it 15 years ago, ya know? I didn’t believe this narrator when he had these thoughts, and found his narrative voice at once too imprecise and too self-consciously Modernist. At one point he’s talking about a philosopher, quotes them, and states that he used it as his year book quote, and I just thought Oh fuck me, here we go. Everything was too noisy and a bit contrived. Still it was pretty and very encouraging for a first go. I’ll stay tuned for what GM does in the future.
September 4, 2023
An immense, layered, and enigmatic odyssey through history, geography, language, poetry, film, music, and biology toward the existential questions that have and will continue to plague the broken brains in all of us who live and die and exist.
Geoffrey uses his incredible wit, deep knowledge, and fearless point of view to unpack our oft taken for granted assumptions about society and the human condition, in an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, artistic tour de force.
Endlessly thought provoking and wholly enjoyable from first to last page, every chapter presents a new idea or an established idea in a new light. The experience of reading ‘Falling Hour’ leaves you electrified to chase the many strands and pathways of Hugh Dalgarno’s mind, in the pursuit of freedom and escape from the comfortable and lonely paralysis that is all to present in our own.
Geoffrey uses his incredible wit, deep knowledge, and fearless point of view to unpack our oft taken for granted assumptions about society and the human condition, in an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, artistic tour de force.
Endlessly thought provoking and wholly enjoyable from first to last page, every chapter presents a new idea or an established idea in a new light. The experience of reading ‘Falling Hour’ leaves you electrified to chase the many strands and pathways of Hugh Dalgarno’s mind, in the pursuit of freedom and escape from the comfortable and lonely paralysis that is all to present in our own.
February 16, 2023
Loved this. Feels like it belongs on a spectrum somewhere between John Dolan's Pleasant Hell and Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief.
This is a good book to read if you like: Sebald, nature writing, long meandering inquiries into the state of things over the course of a single day, if you are open to the idea that Canada is a fake country all hopped up on Methodism, etc.
There's way too much going on here to attempt any better sort of description than that, I think. I really liked it. Especially the parts about old Scottish dudes from the past. Which is really what the whole book is about, except there are parts that don't have that at all. I liked how he tied Protestant ideas of Salvation to modern worries over safety. And basically all the times he was ripping on Calvinism. That was cool. And the Audubon story blew my mind.
I want to re-read this book in the summer, and maybe again after that, because it really felt like it was blasting my head with ideas. Bravo for turning a type of twitter discourse into honest-to-god literature, btw.
This is a good book to read if you like: Sebald, nature writing, long meandering inquiries into the state of things over the course of a single day, if you are open to the idea that Canada is a fake country all hopped up on Methodism, etc.
There's way too much going on here to attempt any better sort of description than that, I think. I really liked it. Especially the parts about old Scottish dudes from the past. Which is really what the whole book is about, except there are parts that don't have that at all. I liked how he tied Protestant ideas of Salvation to modern worries over safety. And basically all the times he was ripping on Calvinism. That was cool. And the Audubon story blew my mind.
I want to re-read this book in the summer, and maybe again after that, because it really felt like it was blasting my head with ideas. Bravo for turning a type of twitter discourse into honest-to-god literature, btw.
February 9, 2025
A novel like this is so hard to do right: an eddy of thoughts wrapped up in the narrator's head as nothing at all happens around him. Our narrator is in a London, Ontario park waiting to sell someone from the internet a picture frame he's found. He contemplates his life, Scotland, Calvinism and Methodism, the call of the red-wing blackbird, the great sins of Canada, colonialism. It's wonderful.
Morrison drifts in beautiful prose around his key themes, at times repeating whole phrases, as our narrator's "broken" brain goes back to his childhood on the west coast with his great-aunt and -uncle (his Scottish heroin-addicted parents are still in the old country). He talks about professors, jobs, and avoids friends and lovers. He's more concerned about Keats's trip up North, the exact colour of clover green, the bark of a tree.
And he gradually realizes he cannot leave the park. He's trapped alone in a sort of existential miasma. Things start to feel less real, sounds disappear, nature takes over. It's dreamlike, but in a hyperaware way, as we slowly spin inward to the end.
Morrison's poetic background helps immensely with the beauty of the prose holding you in. You yourself start to detach and you let it all wash over you. Enjoy the green.
Morrison drifts in beautiful prose around his key themes, at times repeating whole phrases, as our narrator's "broken" brain goes back to his childhood on the west coast with his great-aunt and -uncle (his Scottish heroin-addicted parents are still in the old country). He talks about professors, jobs, and avoids friends and lovers. He's more concerned about Keats's trip up North, the exact colour of clover green, the bark of a tree.
And he gradually realizes he cannot leave the park. He's trapped alone in a sort of existential miasma. Things start to feel less real, sounds disappear, nature takes over. It's dreamlike, but in a hyperaware way, as we slowly spin inward to the end.
Morrison's poetic background helps immensely with the beauty of the prose holding you in. You yourself start to detach and you let it all wash over you. Enjoy the green.
January 2, 2024
One of the best books I've read in a while.
September 1, 2025
“I too loved to read, but the day when I would be good enough to finish a book like that seemed very far away.”
“…if prompted enough my great-uncle would very diffidently tell me the story of Jesus, who in his version was a well-intentioned but vain man who loved the poor but told people he was the son of God because he was embarrassed to be the son of a carpenter.”
“You flicker constantly between the idea that you are part of the damned and a part of the elect and there is no peace and quiet within you.”
“…I did not believe in God. I was stricken at that time by guilt over the things as innocuous as speaking too loudly, improperly washing my hands. ‘You are a God-fearing Catholic without God.’ I was told by a classmate…”
“How did he kill so many of what he professed to love? Was this the only possible end for an intimacy bordering on frenzy?”
“People like us were meant to be used up and to die and for God’s sake to do it quietly.”
“…if prompted enough my great-uncle would very diffidently tell me the story of Jesus, who in his version was a well-intentioned but vain man who loved the poor but told people he was the son of God because he was embarrassed to be the son of a carpenter.”
“You flicker constantly between the idea that you are part of the damned and a part of the elect and there is no peace and quiet within you.”
“…I did not believe in God. I was stricken at that time by guilt over the things as innocuous as speaking too loudly, improperly washing my hands. ‘You are a God-fearing Catholic without God.’ I was told by a classmate…”
“How did he kill so many of what he professed to love? Was this the only possible end for an intimacy bordering on frenzy?”
“People like us were meant to be used up and to die and for God’s sake to do it quietly.”
Read
May 13, 2023I think my biggest problem with this title may be that it is most definitely not suited to the listening experience.
As with a few other titles already this year, perhaps it's a different book entirely when consumed on the printed page???
Maybe one day when my TBR pile is smaller (hah!) I’ll have another go at it.
There is no plot here… this is just a rambling stream of consciousness musing that moves from one thing to another… and it all takes place over the course of a single day.
For me, this does not even begin to hold a candle to Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which is my gold standard where this kind of novel is concerned… highly concentrated all in one day.
This reader was left at a complete loss to even begin to fathom what she was listening to while driving.
DNF
As with a few other titles already this year, perhaps it's a different book entirely when consumed on the printed page???
Maybe one day when my TBR pile is smaller (hah!) I’ll have another go at it.
There is no plot here… this is just a rambling stream of consciousness musing that moves from one thing to another… and it all takes place over the course of a single day.
For me, this does not even begin to hold a candle to Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which is my gold standard where this kind of novel is concerned… highly concentrated all in one day.
This reader was left at a complete loss to even begin to fathom what she was listening to while driving.
DNF
Read
December 21, 2025I didn't finish this. It's funny, I loved The Mezzanine and I enjoyed Ducks, Newburyport, and I think I can read a book about "nothing," but I did lose momentum on this one. I was captivated by some of the early topics, and perhaps especially the protestant/catholic discussions, but I started to realize I didn't really care about halfway through and just went slower & slower until I stopped.
March 25, 2023
From the first page I was absorbed into the internal world of a humourous eclectic.
This one stretched my brain think in a unusual style that kept the pages turning and the wonder of one man's universe front and center.
A must read!
This one stretched my brain think in a unusual style that kept the pages turning and the wonder of one man's universe front and center.
A must read!
October 20, 2023
An achievement. Belletristic, even Romantic, without stuffiness; thoroughly political without stridency or awkward shoehorning; contemporary without a trace of online poisoning (and only one or two moments that betrayed any smell of the modern workshop and its tropes).
June 18, 2024
Impossible to believe this won't be a cult classic.
December 16, 2024
More accurately a 3.5 stars. I really wanted to like it, but for whatever reason I found it hard to follow. Perhaps it was simply where my head was at while I read.
February 28, 2025
forgettable
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