The Canal House [Hardcover]

Mark Lee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2003

Daniel McFarland has refined the life of a war correspondent down to an art. He knows how to get information out of officials who won't talk. He knows how to find the one man with a car who can get you out of town. He knows how to judge the gravity of a situation in a war-torn area (it's a bad sign when the dogs are gone). And he knows how to get to the heart of an explosive story and emerge unscathed. To Daniel, getting the story is everything.

When a trip to a warlord's camp in Uganda goes awry and Daniel's companions end up dead, he has his first serious moment of reckoning with his lack of faith, his steely approach to life, and his cool dispatch of the people around him. And as he falls in love with Julia Cadell, an idealistic doctor, he begins to see the world anew. The two run off together to a canal house in the middle of London, where they find a refuge from their perilous lives.

But they can't ignore the real world forever and are soon persuaded to travel to East Timor, where the entire nation has become a war zone. As the militia prepares to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of refugees, Daniel must decide whether to get the story of a lifetime or to see beyond the headlines to the people whose lives are in the balance.

THE CANAL HOUSE is a stunningly written novel about friends-and lovers-struggling to find meaning in a chaotic world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lee is an experienced foreign correspondent (who is currently also a vice-president at PEN Center USA), and his knowledge of the perils and challenges of that life comes across most powerfully in this somber and elegiac debut novel. It is the story of the life and death of war correspondent Daniel McFarland, who after a brush with death in Uganda develops a new sense of mission and responsibility toward those whose wracked lives he is covering. He is drawn into an affair with Julia Cadell, an English doctor who idealistically ministers to the suffering in war zones, and the book's title refers to a brief idyll they share in London before setting out again on dangerous missions. Their new one is in East Timor, where the Indonesian government is crushing an independence movement, while British and Australian troops, sent in by the UN, try to act as intermediaries without actually joining the fighting. The scenes on that idyllic island smashed by war are the best in the book-they have the breathless immediacy of battlefront reporting-and if Daniel's final decision is a bit melodramatic, a sad resolution is the only possible one for Lee's tale. A subplot about a wealthy British magnate in pursuit of Julia never quite convinces, and the narrator, a photographer who follows Daniel around, is a bit shadowy. But there's no denying the eloquence and terror of Lee's vistas of contemporary war in the world's more obscure corners.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

When foreign correspondent Daniel McFarland heads to work, he never knows if he will come back. Whether his mission is to cover war-torn Bosnia or report on the wreckage of an earthquake, Daniel moves with precision and, most important, always gets the story. Now photographer Nicky Bettencourt has been chosen to travel with Daniel to Uganda to attempt a meeting with a bloodthirsty warlord who has murdered and displaced hundreds of people. Nicky's apprehension is well justified, since the last photographer to travel with Daniel was killed by a land mine. Once in Uganda, Daniel and Nicky arrive at the relief camp of Julia Cadell, a selfless doctor who is assisting the refugees pouring forth from decimated villages. Daniel is unaware that Julia will be the love of his life, and Nicky will not know, until it is too late, that he has forged the friendship of a lifetime. Lee is a foreign correspondent who creates a powerful aura of realism that will forever alter your perception of the news. Elsa Gaztambide
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1 edition (May 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565123794
• ISBN-13: 978-1565123793
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,161,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite Tale!, October 6, 2003

By 

Curtis Grindahl (San Anselmo, California USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Canal House (Hardcover)

For those seeking an adventure novel, you could do better to look elsewhere, something by James W. Hall perhaps. This is a book to sink into, not one to rush through with adrenaline pumping. Yes, there is adventure present as well as suspense, in this well crafted novel, as we travel to violent regions Africa and Indonesia. But what makes the book worthy of five stars, in my estimation, is a beautifully told story of two men and a woman whose lives intersect and become entangled. The pace is leisurely as the author creates wonderful word pictures of place, of encounters. The author draws us into the lives of these three characters and one finds oneself caring about what happens to each of them. I appreciate that the author takes us to Africa and East Timor, sharing with us the depredation of oppression and war, but it is his fine eye for detail and for the subtleties of character that entranced me and made the book difficult to put down. If you appreciate good writing, this is definitely a book worth seeking out.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Modern Farewell To Arms, July 29, 2003

By 

Carleton Eastlake (Beverly Hills, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Canal House (Hardcover)

Mark Lee has written an exceptionally involving novel that manages to be both fast-paced and accessible while telling subtle, multilayered, interlinked stories of developing friendship, love, tragedy and the reawakening of human commitment. Confided to us in alternating sections by a male American war photographer and by a female English doctor who both have a fatal attraction for working in the World's war zones, the novel vividly involves us in the lives of bush pilots, peace-keeping troops, American hostages, charity workers, fund-raiser party-planners, news magazine editors, child soldiers, the super-rich, and the wounded, starving poor, and more, while traveling through the Italian and British haunts of war correspondents, the refugee camps and combat zones of East Africa and Indonesia, and the offices and hunting grounds of the wealthy who patronize refugee charities. Both in his simple but evocative language and in his rare ability to convincingly set a story of love and loss against the keenly observed ironies, horrors, fascinations, and tragedies of war, Lee is evocative of Hemingway at his best.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great writing, May 30, 2003

By 

Stephen Kraisler (philadelphia, pa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Canal House (Hardcover)

(...)I will tell you how much I enjoyed the writing. The sentences run smoothly together and before I knew it whole pages went by. Every once in awhile I would be stopped by a expertly crafted sentence. If it is possible to write a poetic sentence in a book of prose, Mark Lee has done it.
After finishing the book I was greatly disappointed to find that none of the libraries in my area carry his first book. I might even have to buy it :)