PLAYER ONE
Douglas Coupland
William Heinemann
REVIEW: KEN BARRIS
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian writer who popularised the term Generation X in his 1991 novel of the same name.
Player One, his latest work, develops an interesting scenario. Five characters spend five hours in an airport cocktail lounge as world catastrophe unfolds. The narrative devotes a chapter to each hour. These are divided into shorter sections written from the various characters’ points of view.
I was immediately attracted to this speculative structure. It reminds me of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, which examines the lives of five characters after they are killed trying to cross an ancient rope bridge.
Coupland wrote the novel as a companion to the 2010 Massey Lectures which he delivered. This is a prestigious annual event in Canada, in which an established scholar delivers a week-long lecture series on an aspect of contemporary culture or politics.
This is relevant because the novel tries to package a certain diagnosis of the world into plain speech, and into the lives and thoughts of its actors.
I’m not sure if it works.
The style is captured in lines such as this, delivered by a serial killer: ”Look at you all. You’re a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of the most banal form of capitalism.“
Despite this injection of non-fiction into the prose, the five players are at first sharply drawn and amusing. Rick is a burnt-out barman, about to invest a great deal of money in a bogus self-improvement package.
Karen is an attractive, introspective woman who ends up in the cocktail lounge to meet someone she encountered on the internet, an assignation that goes horribly wrong. Luke is a pastor who has lost his faith, embezzled the entire renovation fund of his church and eloped with the money. Rachel is a wonderfully humourless and robotic figure who happens to be blonde and perfect.
She is in the cocktail lounge to find someone who will seduce her in order, she hopes, to become human.
And Player One is an extension of the author’s voice, which gives an ironic foretaste of what is to come in the next hour. It unfortunately recycles the ideas behind the text, rather than taking them deeper or further. In the final sequence, Player One turns out retrospectively to belong to Rachel. It doesn’t quite work at this level either, because the voice of Player One is far more Coupland than Rachel.
A different form of artificiality intrudes in that the background catastrophe unfolds at unconvincing speed. If the global oil supply does run out, it will probably take more than five hours to bring civilisation to an end.
This makes the novel feel a bit camp and tinny, rather like a 1960s sci-fi movie. About halfway through, I found that the cleverness began to pall, and the repetitive shoe-horning of ideas into dialogue grew slightly tedious, partly because all the characters circled around the same thoughts.
Despite these reservations, if you like speculative fiction and enjoy the odd apocalypse, you might find Player One a thought-provoking and entertaining read.
l Barris is a prize-winning writer and poet, and teaches at Cape Peninsula University of Technology.