Happiness of Fish.

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British
Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and author of The Salvation Army and the
Public.

It is January 2005. Gerry Adamson sits there, in the hull of his winter-idle boat, with his laptop computer at the ready, surrounded by the fragments of his writing classes, waiting for the inspiration to write his magnum opus. “Gerry shuffles, through the notebooks or scrolls through the electronic guts of the laptop. He wonders and tries to write down how, in the last year or so, he’s managed to get his world this small.” And so, all he does is ponder his unproductive past, and do nothing else. “Tomorrow,” he promises himself, “he’ll start joining up the pieces he’s got.”

But his tomorrows will be just like his yesterdays: the great novel will never be written. And that about sums up this novel—a novel going nowhere very slowly, written badly, filled with tedious detail of uninteresting events and lifestyles. If writing in a boring fashion, filling the space with boring details, is the way to create a picture of modern boredom, then Armstrong has succeeded.