Essential Coupland: 'Player One'

It's a funny old world, when the characters in a new Douglas Coupland novel are quoting directly from previous Douglas Coupland books; but then, that's the funny old world that Douglas Coupland expresses so well.

'What is the you of you? Where do you begin and end? This you thing - is it an invisible silk woven from your memories...?' asks Bertis Freemont, the sniper who ends up imprisoned in an airport cocktail lounge by four characters thrown together during an apocalyptic oil crisis that rocks the world...

Freemont is, in fact, quoting one of the seminal lines from Coupland's Life After God; and this accompanies other direct quotes, familiar phrases and well-rehearsed themes that weave through this book, for those with eyes to see.

And so, Player One is a compendium of sorts; a distillation of the author's essence. DNA? The him of him, in a manner of speaking.

It's also the perfect airport book, the kind of thing you should read in transit, when your carefully constructed sense of identity slips just far enough from who-you-really-are to leave you positively vulnerable to the bigger questions of life, identity, faith, work, love, sin, and even redemption... As it does his characters.

Some of Coupland's best questions are fleshed out vividly here, such as: What happens when the power fails? The plot confronts us with a looming technological crisis over oil, which embodies a spiritual reality: that we cannot simply keep going the way we have been. Any of us.

As ever, there are more questions than answers. But the crescendo comes in the form of a quotation repeated from this book. A self-help fraudster first utters the words; but Rachel, the narrator, sees wisdom in his snake-oiled words, and re-uses them, to effect.

'Here's a toast to everyone on earth who's ever been eager - no, desperate - for even the smallest sign that there exists something finer, larger, and more miraculous about our inner selves than we could ever have supposed.

'Here's to all of us reaching out our hands to other people everywhere, reaching out to pull them from the icebergs on which they stand frozen, to pull them through the burning hoops of fire that frighten them, to help them climb over the brick walls that block their paths. Let us reach out to shock and captivate people into new ways of thinking.'

And here's to the essence of Douglas Coupland.

Brian Draper

Brian Draper guides individuals and groups in spiritual intelligence. He's author of Spiritual Intelligence: A New Way of Being. For more info on his work, visit www.spiritualintelligence.co.uk

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