(It's impossible to read more than a few pages of a Coupland novel now without coming across a reference to Google.) His characters are still wondering what would happen to someone who is technically immortal but killed in an explosion: how would all the pieces come back together? And if you could take a pill to make you normal, would you do it? If there is a God, does he like people or not? Rachel, when she has gone to her "Happy Place", feels "free and powerful – it's as if she's been given the search result for every keyword ever put into Google". The way Coupland moulds his fiction from the throwaway debris of North American popular culture is quite brilliant but after 12 novels it can seem a little familiar. When the power goes off, Luke mentally lists other things that are potentially disappearing: "Cars, electricity, Cancun holidays, frozen Lean Cuisine dinners, the give-a-penny/take-a-penny jar at the local Esso station – hell, the whole Esso station – police safety, water out of taps, clean air". A happy ending in a Coupland novel – even one about the end of the world – usually centres on the characters forming new heterosexual relationships based on shared anxieties about the true meaning of the universe. Everyone (except a few bad guys) gets a happy ending.
At the end of the novel is a list of semi-neologisms including aloneism, Ikeasis, pseudoalienation, and ninetenicillin (a drug that takes you back to the state you were in on 10 September 2001). There's a bit of drama (a sniper shows up and has to be duct-taped to a chair), but mainly dialogue, as the characters discuss their hopes and dreams and wonder what comprises a soul and whether or not there is an afterlife.
While things explode, and toxic fallout drifts closer, we get to know Karen, a receptionist at a psychiatric clinic who has flown in to meet a guy from an internet chatroom Luke, a small-town pastor who has just run off with $20,000 from the church renovation fund Rachel, an impossibly beautiful young autistic woman who has bought a $3,400 Chanel dress in order to help find a man to father her child and Rick, an ex-alcoholic bartender who wants to give everything he owns to a self-help guru with a bad fake tan.Īnyone who has ever read a Douglas Coupland novel can pretty much guess what happens next. What better place to watch the end of the world than the shabby Toronto Airport Camelot Hotel cocktail lounge? When oil prices suddenly rise to almost a thousand dollars a barrel, the power cuts out, the TV fades to static and planes stop taking off.
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