The novel I began in January 2009 is finally, FINALLY finished. I’m just waiting on my proof copy, so I can take care of any errors. The digital Kindle copy will be out Dec 3 2023, my 38th birthday. The physical copy will be out sometime later this December.
That’s the cover above. The only difference is my name and the title won’t be typed. It will be handwritten in my own writing. I just have to get that done in the next week or so.
The book is called All the Quiet Hours. The cover photo was taken by a writer friend of mine named Rae Matthews (who I wish would write more stuff. One of her short stories is as good a short story as any of my all-time favourites like “An Encounter” by James Joyce, “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang, Alice Munro’s “Open Secrets,” or even my all-time favourite short story ever of all-time ever by anyone, Denis Johnson’s “Work,” a story that hit me so hard I cried for hours after reading it. It is a story that lessens the distance between literature and life. In that Johnson story, the narrator (known affectionately throughout Jesus’ Son as “fuckhead”) sees a bartender he remembers from years before. A bartender who was everybody’s favourite because she free-poured very generous drinks. Here is the passage, which ranks among my very favourites:
I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.
My God. The melancholic, excuse-making way the narrator says but it was only that I remembered breaks my heart. And …but you were my mother? Holy fuck.
I used to think that you could only understand something like that if you have been an addict, a true addict. But literature like that, like Denis Johnson’s “Work” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and that story Rae sent me, is the best kind, the kind that makes you feel a little less lonely in a world where we’re all trapped in the locked room of our minds. There’s a line in my book about this. Far less eloquent, but still:
There is an unbridgeable distance between yourself and everyone else. And maybe that’s the problem at the heart of life.
Anyway, you could consider All the Quiet Hours either a tripartite novel, like one of my favourite novels, Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson, or you could consider it three books in one with a 20-page “intermission.” Here are the three books, in order, along with the intermission (which is kind of a Coach’s Corner, coming after Book I).
Book One is called Fading Captain (pages 5-282):
The Intermission is titled Into the Empire (pages 283-308):
Book Two is called Yawns Beyond (pages 309-582):
Book Three is called Of Facts and Friendship (pages 584-797):
This novel (or three novels plus a short story that intersect in minor ways) is my magnum freakin’ opus but I’m not taking it too damn seriously. I’ve always wanted to see a book where the blurbs, which are usually sycophantically laudatory (“This is Stephen King at his best” for The Tommyknockers…an abysmal that novel he has admitted he does not remember writing) are the exact opposite.
So here is the back cover of the physical book (the barcode will change).
If you’re curious, Little Ghost Recording Co. is a micro-label I used to (and I guess still do) run. We released mainly music from my own bands, but also a few records from other bands. The catalogue number is just a way for me to keep track of my own releases, just like Trent Reznor does with his “Halo” series.
The book ends with “A word about the title,” an idea I stole from Martin Amis’ London Fields. I’m gonna post it in its entirety below, just in case you’re curious because I didn’t come up with the title myself. I just thought it was very beautiful. And I hope my book lives up to its name.
A WORD ABOUT THE TITLE:
My mother comes from a big family of readers. She is a voracious reader herself and has read tens of thousands of books in her life. Growing up surrounded by looming bookshelves, I would gaze longingly up at the books, desiring the “it” I knew they contained.
One day many years ago my mother was sitting in a restaurant somewhere in Ireland with her father, having just finished a meal. They were enjoying a languid, relaxing moment, when my grandfather lit a cigarette, looked at my mother and asked “have you ever read All the Quiet Hours?”
My mother said she hadn’t but the title was memorable and she made a mental note to find the book. But life and other books (hundreds of them) got in the way and she’d soon forgotten all about it until a few years later when she’d just finished eating a meal with her brother.
They were sitting in an Irish restaurant, again enjoying a languid, relaxing moment. In fact, that particular moment was so similar to one my mother had with her father a few years prior that she laughed out loud when her brother, knowing nothing of that prior conversation, looked at her mischievously and asked “have you ever read All the Quiet Hours.”
The two moments were so uncannily similar, as was the manner in which her father and brother (who share the same first name) asked her about the book, that the book began to take on a mystical aura. They’d both asked her about it as if divulging a secret. And they’d both been unable to describe the book in detail, only saying that it was strange and beautiful.
The sheer power of this coincidence stayed with my mother for years and she began to search for All the Quiet Hours. But she couldn’t find it. Bookstore clerks shook their heads sadly, managers and owners called obscure booksellers and hung up the phone stumped. She even looked for it in other languages, thinking perhaps her brother had read it in Italian (which he spoke and read) or Gaelic (which he and my mother and their father spoke and read). But she never found it.
It annoyed her, being unable to find it, but it also enhanced the mystery of what was already a semi-magical tome, and my mother loves mysteries and magic. In my hometown there is a particular street off a main drag which turns and rises so that you cannot see very far down the road. My mother began to think of this street as her “mystery street” and even once stopped my father from driving down it.
“Stop! Go back!”
“What? Why?”
“This is my mystery street! I don’t want to know what’s down there!”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Go back!”
My father went back.
When my mother told me about All the Quiet Hours it made a strong impression on me and I too began searching in earnest for the book. But I couldn’t find it either. My mother told me the story in 1997 or so, because even a few years later when the internet became mainstream, the book was not findable, which was a shame to me because I found the title so evocative and haunting.
Then, in 2008, I finally found it. Or didn’t. I’ll let you decide.
I’m not sure if it was my grandfather or uncle who got the book’s title wrong, or my mother, but it doesn’t matter. It’s an eminently forgivable error. Real readers read a lot, and getting a single word wrong in a title of a book one hasn’t read in years (or in my Mum’s case, has never read) is no big deal.
It turned out the book in question is Loren Eiseley’s All the Strange Hours. I found it, ordered it, read it, and found it to be every bit as eerie and unclassifiable as my uncle and grandfather said it was and as the title implies.
Loren Eiseley was the Carl Sagan of his day. He wrote numerous books in the popular science genre but All the Strange Hours is his autobiography, albeit an unconventional one. Instead of a linear narrative explaining how he rose from humble beginnings and overcame near-deafness to become a world-class scientist and renowned author, Eiseley chose a number of random, odd and beautiful vignettes from his life, moments tenuously connected to each other but still undeniably connected via the strange dreamlike texture that permeates both the moments themselves and Eiseley’s remembrance of them. The whole book is rendered in gorgeous sunblasts of prose-poetry. It is decidedly not stream-of-consciousness writing yet still a torrent of words.
In one scene Eiseley and three other unemployed homeless youths are lazing on a train platform under the hot summer sun somewhere in America during the Great Depression, passing back and forth a jug of grape soda, waiting for the freight train to arrive so they can hop on. Nobody says much, It’s an odd moment to choose to include in one’s memoirs…except it isn’t. The texture is the same as the other vignettes.
In another scene Eiseley works at a hatchery guarding the birds. The barn is lit by hundreds of candles and covered in dry straw and if Eiseley falls asleep he will wake up on fire. You’d think such a serious consequence would keep a young boy with his whole professional life ahead of him awake, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong. After all, the book’s not titled All the Prudent Decisions. In another anecdote, Eiseley and a Catholic priest are spending a day spelunking together when both their flashlights die in unison. The two men are forced to stand there in a darkness so complete and total that it’s as if light were a distant rumor. Like trying to describe color to a blind person. The wait they are forced to endure would be almost unbearable if not for the priest’s indomitable spirit and good cheer. There is another passage in which poor Eiseley is stricken with temporary deafness (he was always deaf in one ear but this was a temporary attack on both ears). His descriptions of walking through the crowded subway stations of Boston, packed with people yet eerily quiet, are downright sublime.
All the Strange Hours is a wonderful book and I recommend it unreservedly, but I had an ulterior reason for being so pleased that it was not called All the Quiet Hours. During the years I searched for the book, not yet knowing the correct title, AtQH took on an ethereal, otherworldly, haunting beauty wholly out of proportion to the book’s contents (beautiful as they might be).
Eiseley’s book turned out to be every bit as strange as its title and it is fitting that my grandfather and brother mentioned the book to my mother in moments that were themselves strange and permeated by the tangerine-sky world of magic that always seems to hover just above and out of sight to those with rich imaginations, readers of the world, dreamers all.
The fact that the book me and my mother had been hunting for was in fact called All the Strange Hours meant All the Quiet Hours did not exist, which meant I could use it. Such a good title surely deserved to exist. And there’s no plagiarism or copyright law that protects a non-existent title.
I remember reading somewhere that The Offspring were considering naming their 2006 album Chinese Democracy (You Snooze, You Lose) because, at that point, Guns ‘N Roses had been working on Chinese Democracy since 1996 (it finally came out in 2008, but aside from the sleazy swagger of “Better,” there’s not much on the album to justify its twelve-year gestation period. Not like I can talk. I took longer to make my book than Axl Rose did to make his album.
See, I’d been wanting and waiting my whole life to write a novel but I never knew where to start. A strong title seemed as good a place as any. I’m not John Irving. I can’t write the final sentence first and then write an entire book leading up to it. He employed that method for The World According to Garp. He did it with A Prayer for Owen Meany. He does it with all his books. It feels too much like construction, doing it that way, rather than writing. The literary version of decorating a Christmas tree and then putting the star on top as the finishing touch. Irving have even described his modus operandi using construction jargon: “the building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.” Maybe he’s on to something though. Irving has written fifteen novels as of 2023. It took me fifteen years to write one. But Irving is a genius. I’m just a normal person who likes good books with good titles. I’ll read a good book with a bad title, but a good book with a good title is better.
My mother’s favorite title is Dead Heat on a Merry-Go Round. Mine include Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and You Shall Know Our Velocity! (Thanks to my friend Helen Marukh for loaning me the Egger’s book. I loved it.)
As for non-fiction books, I love weighty titles like The Great War and Modern Memory and The Guns of August (both about WWI). A good title seems to me to announce: “Yes, I am worth the time it takes to read me.” A great title sets the stage. It establishes mood before a page has even been turned. And now I had just such a title. I would write All the Quiet Hours. I would create the book my mother was looking for (I doubt this book is what she had in mind but hey, at least now we can say it exists).
I will freight the curious sensation one gets when hearing a beautiful title for the first time with the gravitas it seemed to call out for. However elusive greatness is, it’s not arrogant to try to be great. My favorite sports team is the Toronto Maple Leafs. I’ve been watching them try, and fail, to be great since 1993. But that’s a whole other book to itself, so I won’t go there. Go Leafs Go, however.
This afterword is really just an overlong justification explaining why the dedication page says “For Mum, finally.” Because here it is now. All the Quiet Hours exists.
One more thing. Martin Amis begins his magnum opus London Fields (itself a great title) with a foreward that says: “A word about the title.”
I “borrowed” Amis’ exact phasing deliberately because “a word about the title” is more authoritative than a dry or dull “note.” I also wanted to echo Amis’ theory about titles, a theory I subscribe to with more enthusiasm than Vanity Fair. (And I love Vanity Fair.) Here is Martin Amis on titles in fiction:
[T]here are two kinds of title – two grades, two orders. The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there. The second kind of title is present all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page. My suggestions (and they cost me sleep) are all the first kind of title. London Fields is the second kind of title. So let’s call it London Fields. This book is called London Fields. London Fields…
As for the “first kind of title,” Amis lists several he considered for London Fields before he came to his senses and gave the book its famous name:
Several alternatives suggested themselves. For a while I toyed with Time’s Arrow [Amis ended up using this title for his 1991 novel]. Then I thought Millennium would be wonderfully bold (a common belief: everything is called Millennium just now). I even flirted, late at night, with The Death of Love. In the end the most serious contender was The Murderee, which seemed both sinister and deeply catchy.
Each of Amis’ potential titles are of the first type. They also suck. London Fields is a much better title, don’t you think? Like All the Quiet Hours, it belongs to the second category of title, the kind that “lives and breathes…on every page.”
I can say that my book’s title is excellent because, aside from Amis’ note, the epigraphs to each four parts, and a bunch of other quotes from literature peppered throughout, I didn’t write it myself. I am blameless.
I am responsible for most of the writing between these pages that isn’t clearly by other writers. So if you dislike the book, it’s my fault. If you like the title, it’s not mine. Except it is. Hah!
Now, I didn’t put this as a foreword because it seemed presumptuous (and even luxurious) for a first-time novelist to clear his throat before telling a story and say “ahem! Let me expound on my motivations regarding the title of my oh-so-important tome. Then I’ll let you read it.” It seemed better to put the story out front and, if you still give a shit at the end, you’re probably better positioned to care about the title and how it came to be.
Hence this short afterword. Instead of me saying “here we go now, into All the Quiet Hours,” like Amis (something I relished having the opportunity to do for years), I am instead saying, like a road sign reminding you that you are leaving some vast geographical region, that you have just read All the Quiet Hours.
I hope you liked it. Maybe you loved it. Maybe one day you’ll come back to it and it will bring you to a place where the world stops spinning. Maybe you’ll think about it years from now in the still moments of your life. In the quiet hours.
In all the quiet hours…
xoxox ;)
January 2009-October 2023 Toronto, Ontario Danny Lindsay