Falling Hour

Geoffrey Morrison

Description

Co-op available

Advance reader copies (digital and print)

National print and online campaign

Social media campaign and giveaways

A New Literary Talent: Readers of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Tom McCarthy, W. G. Sebald, André Alexis, and Lucy Ellman will appreciate the contemplative, philosophical tone.

Colonialism and History: This novel takes a critical look at British colonialism and its lasting deleterious effects.

Poet-Novel Crossover: Morrison joins the trend of books from poets like Ocean Vuong, Lisa Robertson, Ben Lerner, and Heather Christle who make the leap from poetry.

Sujets

• World Literature
• Political
• Literary
• Canadá
• Literature
• Politics
• 21st Century
• Canada
• Fiction
• John Keats

Informations

• Publié par: Coach House Books
• Date de parution: 07 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770567290
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The book cover features an image framed in pale yellow. The centered image is bright green and is comprised of small strokes in a lighter green colour making it look like grass. The title is in a bold, sans serif font and is placed vertically on the left and along the bottom.
Falling Hour
Falling Hour
Geoffrey D. Morrison
Coach House Books, Toronto
copyright Geoffrey D. Morrison, 2022
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Falling hour / Geoffrey D. Morrison.
Names: Morrison, Geoffrey, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220243972 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220243980 | ISBN 9781552454466 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770567290 ( EPUB ) | ISBN 9781770567306 ( PDF )
Classification: LCC PS8626.O75853 F35 2023 | DDC C813/.6-dc23
Falling Hour is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 729 0 ( EPUB ); ISBN 978 1 77056 730 6 ( PDF )
Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [e-mail] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)
For Robert Wilson Mortimer and Molly Mortimer (n e Dalgarno)
Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.
- Marx, Theories of Surplus Value
Green grow the birks on bonnie Ythanside And low lie the lowlands of Fyvie-o
- The Bonny Lass o Fyvie, Roud #545
1.
F rom an airplane, or an out-of-body experience, the town I lived in then would look like someone had scattered a sackful of giant concrete dice in a forest of broadleaf trees. The airline passenger or transmigrating soul would mark that six or seven of the cubes had landed in a huddle around the central lawn of a large public park. The grass was the faded green of an old gaming table.
From the ground, and from inside rather than outside my own body, I could report that the cubes were the colour of sea-damp sand and the grass in the park was steaming. I was sitting on the grass. The seat of my white jeans was wet, as were the palms of my hands. In my lap I held an empty grey picture frame. The pattern around the edges was - well, I don t know if it has a special name. A grey cascade, or a ziggurat, eight steps around each side. Then empty space to put my hands, feet, or head through, if I cared to. I did care to - all of those, so I tried each one in turn. Then I arranged the frame on the grass, stood up, and looked at it. The frame around the grass, the grass around the frame. Blades shivered, stroked harp-like by invisible fingers of air, and a drop of water trailed step-by-step down the ziggurat. Wetness cooled on my hands. The frame remained the frame.
I had found it the previous day on the red hydrant in front of the house I was renting, slung on the diagonal over the hydrant s top and one of its arms like a stiff sash. Kids playing ring toss, I thought. My second thought was that if it wasn t banged up too badly I could sell it on the internet for ten, maybe even fifteen dollars. I did not need the money, exactly, but with this sale I could furnish an hour or more with a purpose, however small. Having a purpose meant I could do something other than reflect on the state of my brain - which, over the past few months, had been the last thing I thought about before I slept most nights, the first thing I thought about in the morning, and the reason I woke up at least once in the hours between, too tired to change the subject but too darkly agitated to rest.
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. I did not dare, so I made constant minor adjustments and stared, and the bright motes wandered across my face like winter constellations on the ceiling of a planetarium. Gemini, I thought, and Taurus, and Orion s Belt. Orion s Belt especially. The belt of a frozen hunter dead in the sky, like a cosmicscale version of the kids playing ring toss. The big kids. It was unbearable. I had taken my discovery to the walk-in clinic, the only adult patient in a roomful of parents with babies who coughed like seals. The GP called my complaint intriguing. Obviously pressed for time, she gave me a number to call to get on the waiting list for group therapy. I called it and truthfully answered their questions about whether I wanted to hurt myself. (I did not. I told you it was unbearable, but evidently some unbearable things can be borne.) They never called me back.
In the meantime, I had tried to feel better by finding things to do. I had a job, but it was in my home, and not hard, and took up little of my time. Perhaps this was part of the problem. My employers owned an online store selling premium bags and accessories to the kind of people who seemed to exist only in photos, who regarded my employers exclusive pieces as necessary investments in their personal brands. I had never seen anyone wearing them outside of a photo. Certainly not in this town. Officially my function was data entry, but on some days I had no data to enter. I knew my employers were essentially running a doomed vanity business with their parents money, and at times I suspected I was only on the payroll to create the appearance that this was not so. Likely because I was not being directly supervised, I was paid thirty-six thousand Canadian dollars a year, a figure that occasionally made me feel great and occasionally made me feel guilty. When I felt great it was because I was leeching funds from the idle rich, who had after all started it with their intergenerational theft of surplus value - thereby making my leeching an act of redistributive justice, and me a hero. When I felt guilty, it was not, you understand, because I was being paid a living wage for doing nothing. Rather it was because others were doing worse and harder work for significantly less. Whenever I felt this way, I gave up to a fourth of my paycheque to the Party of Socialist Workers (Marxist-Leninist). I wasn t a member. I didn t even go to their discussion groups. But I had a respect for the organizing abilities of the Bolsheviks in the period leading up to the October Revolution, modest personal tastes, a small rented bungalow in a relatively cheap town, a materialist conception of history, and no one else to spend my money on. I had no pets, or children, or siblings, and I did not know if my parents were living or dead. My guardians, a great-aunt and -uncle, had died seven years before and raised no other children. I lived completely alone, which made the finding of things to do a struggle at times - particularly now that I had decided, in the spirit of a radical therapeutic experiment, to greatly limit my use of the internet (I wanted to delineate exactly how responsible it was for my feeling that I had a broken brain). Sometimes I bought myself clothes. Nothing new, and certainly nothing sold by my employers. I liked thrifted pieces: white denim, nylon shells, acid wash, strange colour combinations. But mostly I read. When I couldn t read, I listened to Japanese ambient music, and when I couldn t do that, I kept my plants alive, a task that required so many mysterious things to go well that it could easily take up most of a day. I watched the advance of a blemish on a bamboo leaf like the spread of an epidemic, tested the soil of my jade plants for pH levels, set aside specially filtered water for a carnivorous butterwort that always seemed on the verge of physically falling apart, reverting to the mush it had sprung from. In the interstitial times between these acts, my memories became the focus of my attention. Playing back the sequences of past events in my mind was almost the only thing that did not make my brain feel broken. I knew I was cheating of course. If I knew already how an event had begun, and developed, and ended, I could pretend it had unfolded with an almost balletic majesty it had not truly had. And once I had locked a coherent sequence of events in place, I could let the chaotic details at the periphery of my memories fall into darkness. The resulting smooth stories were hardly proof that I had not felt broken-brained before - perhaps even the whole time I had been alive. But they were a comfort.
The wet grass shuddered like a slow-moving ocean, waves of blades breaking in confusion against the trees at the great field s edge. I too was at the edge of this ocean, first and foremost because it was hot that day and I wanted to be under a tree. But not coincidentally, the edge of the real ocean had once meant a great deal to me, enough that I will want to say more about it later. I picked up the frame, saw the ghost impression it had made in the grass, saw as well for the first time how the pricing sticker on its back had worn to a jagged, off-white smear so thin it was almost part of the wood. The frame was old, I realized. And heavy. Heavier than the mass-produced ones I was used to, the kind my guardians would have bought to frame the picture postcards of Capri sent them by a better-off second cousin