The Canal, Lee Rourke's debut novel and a strong contender for the Guardian's 'Not the Booker Prize', is what might politely be termed a 'novel of ideas'. It is also adventurous, enthralling and, to the best of my knowledge, quite unlike anything to have emerged from British literature in some time.

The novel tells the story of a man who, one morning, decides to walk to a canal on the boundary between Hackney and Islington rather than go to work. He spends the entire day there, and then the next, watching the coots, geese and swans which live upon the water, and observing the movements of the office workers in a building on the opposite bank.

The story is also that of the mysterious woman who appears one day at the bench and begins to reveal her secrets to him. Through their conversations, we are gradually familiarised with the strange details of their lives and fantasies. Both have an unusual outlook on the world, marked by the sort of odd detachment characteristic of people with highly analytical minds. His makes him an observer, passive and, at times, yogi-like; hers, in the past, has led her to commit a terrible crime, whose repercussions form the unseen mechanism behind the entire plot.

It is, as the back cover promises, a book about boredom. The man, who is also the narrator, returns to the subject throughout the novel. He revels in boredom, wishing to experience it in its purest form. It is also about desire, which he believes is the same thing: both, ultimately, are 'the urge to do something'. It is this urge which motivates the senseless acts of destruction perpetrated by the teenage gang who roam the canal, disinherited and unoccupied in a changing world, and with this urge that much of humanity is locked in a futile battle.

Despite the subject matter, the novel does not bore. The dialogue, while suffering from an overuse of ellipses and an occasional tendency toward cliché, is beautifully wrought, often sparkling with a canny profundity. The prose is clean, stylish and effective. In its moments of unfulfilled desire, it is almost suffocating in its yearning; in the explosions of violence with which the characters' releases of boredom are always accompanied, meanwhile, it is visceral, at times even eliciting a shudder.

In the end, the man realises that he is far more ordinary than he would like to believe. He is incapable of resisting indefinitely the downward pull of his desire to act; and, when he finally gives in, he finds himself powerless to achieve the result for which he longs. The outcome, instead, is tragic and fatal. The book closes with a thud and a crack.