Book Review: Player One by Douglas Coupland

A typically self-aware bunch of Coupland characters find themselves stranded in the bar of an airport hotel while in the outside world the price of oil reaches $350 a barrel... and society implodes.

Rick is a reformed alcoholic about to give a large cheque to a self-improvement guru who's promised to change his life.

Karen has flown half way across America to meet her blind date, Warren, after they met in a Peak Oil Apocalypse chatroom.

Luke is a small town pastor who wishes someone would invent an 8th deadly sin to make his confessionals a little less monotonous.

And Rachel breeds white mice for laboratories and has multiple structural anomalies in her limbic system that render her emotionless, humourless and without any understanding of human nature... though she is drop dead gorgeous.

As with the best of Coupland's novels, Player One combines high concept thriller with sharp characterisation and trenchant sociological insight. And as with most Coupland novels, it has absolutely no idea how to end. There are loads of great ideas along the way though and it's frequently thought-provoking and hilarious.

Goddamn Internet ... his computer's spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word "Internet". Come on: World War II earned its capitalization. The internet just sucks human beings away from reality.

Generation A

Billed as a sequel to Douglas Coupland's famous debut (Generation X), this is actually no more of a sequel than any of the other novels he's written in the past 19 years. Coupland's books always follow a similar path, with clever-clever characters sitting around having witty conversations and telling amusing anecdotes that reflect the strange and wonderful society they're part of. Occasionally he fools us into thinking there's an actual plot going on (most notably in my favourite of his books, Girlfriend In A Coma) though that's rarely why we read Coupland. We read for his warm humour, his zeitgeist-surfing opinions, his slightly annoying characters, and his brilliant way with language. He usually manages to touch your heart too, somewhere along the way, which is always a bonus.

Generation A fools you into thinking Coupland is writing a thriller, with a pacy opening in which 5 disparate individuals in the near future are stung by (extinct) bees and subsequently bundled away by scientists for further investigation. It's all quite exciting - for Coupland! - until the writer reveals his true plan. This isn't a sci-fi actioner at all... but the set-up for a decameron. Don't worry, I'd have had to google it too. Fortunately, Coupland provides his own explanation...

"The Decameron is a collection of short stories written from 1350 to 1353 by Italian writer, Giovanni Boccaccio. The collection begins with a description of the Black Death. Then we meet a group of seven young men and women who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the countryside. To pass the time, each member of the group tells stories about lust, the nobility and the clergy."

And so Coupland segues into his own decameron, in which the five bee-sting victims (from the USA, Canada, France, New Zealand and Sri Lanka) tell a series of made-up stories that combine similar themes and elements to reveal more about their background, their world, and their generation... a generation that is rapidly becoming addicted to a new drug that stops them ever worrying about the future.

The transition between the two sections is awkward. As a reader, you're enjoying one story and then you're expected to jettison your excitement and devote yourself instead to a series of seemingly unconnected shorts. It makes for an uncomfortable and off-putting mid-section, but once you're over that hump Coupland again begins to dazzle with stories about the devolution of language into text speak, heavy metal fans who suddenly forget how numbers work, and a Sex With No Strings romance between two preachers.

Like all Coupland's novels, Generation A is bursting with ideas and a keen insight into the world and where it's going. He gamely tries to tie all the threads together to make sense of the plot as a whole, but by then it doesn't really matter. That's not why we read Coupland. Story isn't everything.