Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland
God is nowhere. God is now here.
It's a linguistic trick with a space. Yet those words have power; they hold in tension the forces of life and faith. Bad things happen, which wouldn't always seem so bad if a good God wasn't looking on.
Douglas Coupland's new novel, Hey Nostradamus!, takes a Columbine-style massacre as its trigger to explore this tension further. Cheryl, a Christian teenager from Vancouver (and member of Youth Alive!) doodles the 'God is now here' epigram shortly before she is shot, in a terrifyingly random act, by three 'gunboys' one October lunchtime in 1988.
As she tells her story ('I'm no longer a part of the world, and I'm still not yet a part what follows'), she can hear the prayers of confused, angry people rising around her:
'Dear Lord, protect our children while they ... Lord keep them as ... Sorry. I can't pray right now.'
'Dear Lord, Cheryl - the pretty girl who was the last one to be shot. She wrote that on her binder, didn't she? "God is nowhere." Maybe she was right.'
In a way, this is Ecclesiastes for a post-Columbine, post-9/11 world that has lost its moral and spiritual compass. Coupland explores the fragility of life and the randomness of sudden death, especially through the eyes of bruised or bruising Christians who are struggling to cope with the effects of loss and absence. It's a compelling but toe-curling read, especially for anyone who has grown up a victim of over-zealous youth groups.
Since writing Generation X 13 years ago, Coupland has been searching for signs of transcendence and redemption on behalf of a culture that's trying to make sense of 'life after God'. Judging from Hey Nostradamus!, our 'binary' Christian answers remain, for him, in question.
But he's not giving up. In fact, he's on a mission. 'There must always be hope,' he told LICC recently. 'There has to be hope. Even if it takes the most tortured and bizarre twist possible. And the hope has to come from believing in God or living for something higher.'
And surely enough, this plot has such a twist of fate. It seems that someone, in the end, is looking out for us. God is nowhere. God is now here. And Coupland is writing - with great passion, honesty and elegance - in that crucial space in between.
Brian Draper
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