eleanor rigby - douglas coupland
‘Death without the possibility of changing the world is the same as a life that never was.’
That’s the warning from Douglas Coupland in his new novel, Eleanor Rigby. His heroine is Liz Dunn, a lonely woman who’s unremarkable to the point of invisibility. Her life is as blank as her apartment, until, that is, the son she gave up for adoption crashes back into it …
As you’d expect from Coupland, the twists are cartoonish and the story has familiar, soulful themes: death, apocalyptic visions, signs in the sky, self-reinvention, Christian belief, and the now-and-not-yet tension of waiting for life to really start …
Jeremy, Liz’s son, has MS, and is a ‘teller’ – someone who sees life from a different perspective. He wants to wake people up from their soul-sleep (which is ironic as he sells beds): ‘When you become a zombie, your soul vanishes. There’s no heaven or hell for you – there’s absolutely nothing.’
He has visions, and one, in particular, is a parable within a parable. A group of farmers hear a voice from the sky and decide they don’t need to plant their crops, because the world is about to end and they’re promised a heavenly reward. But then the voice tells them that, because they have lost their belief in the possibility of change, it won’t end after all.
Jeremy sees dry bones coming down from the sky – an allusion, perhaps, to Ezekiel’s valley. And although he dies before explaining the vision, Liz – awoken to life by her son – sees the final instalment for herself, in which hers is the voice from above.
‘The farmers asked me, “What is our choice? And I said, 'You have to decide whether you want God to be here with you as a part of your everyday life, or whether you want God to be distant from you, not returning until you’ve created a world perfect enough for Him to re-enter.”’
Christians should be tellers, charged with the urgent responsibility of showing what it means to bring God alive, here and now. As Coupland told me last year: ‘The moment you stop thinking about it, it’s game over. You don’t just renegotiate your relationship with God every Sunday, or even every day. Every moment of your life you should be thinking about it.’
Eleanor Rigby is another, impassioned wake-up call - for those with ears to hear.
Brian Draper
additional resources
For Brian Draper's full interview with Douglas Coupland, following the publication of Hey Nostradamus! last year, click here.
Read our CWC on Hey Nostradmus!.
Read our CWC on All Families Are Psychotic.
Read Brian Draper's interview with Douglas Coupland which first appeared in Third Way in 1997, called 'Engaging in Reflection'.
Douglas Coupland is presenting a one-man play called September 10th - A social history of the 1990s - at the RSC in Stratford in October.
