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Product Description
Quill & Quire
Player One is best-selling author, artist, and now clothing designer Douglas Coupland’s contribution to the annual CBC Massey Lectures. Instead of the traditional series of five lectures, Coupland has produced a novel about four characters in crisis, each having taken a leap toward what they hope is a better life. Coincidence brings them together in the cocktail lounge of a Toronto airport hotel, while the world outside descends into chaos.
Player One is so reminiscent of British writer J.G. Ballard it verges on pastiche. The airport setting, damaged characters, and apocalyptic themes are all classic Ballard. However, while Coupland manages to capture the tone of Ballard’s work, he is a less astute observer. Ballard’s books are apocalyptic in the ancient Greek sense: revelatory, providing detailed examinations of particular times, places, and sociological phenomena. Coupland makes inroads in this direction, but relies too heavily on coincidence and superficial distractions like guns and explosions to carry his story.
The novel is subtitled What Is to Become of Us. Read as a declaration, Coupland offers little but fear, confusion, and poorly developed musings on the nature of time, story, and faith. If the subtitle is a question, then the author largely fails to answer it, and seriously posits it only in one scene near the beginning of the novel. Karen, a single mother, is flying into Toronto for a date arranged online and catches a teenager taking photos of her with his iPhone. She gives him the finger, then wonders about privacy, the role of technology in contemporary life, and her conflicted feelings about the adolescent’s gaze. That remarkable little scene contains a more interesting, subtle, and nuanced interrogation of contemporary society than anything else in the novel.
Player One has other merits. There are entertaining dashes of violence and suspense, and Rachel, a young woman suffering from a kind of autism (among other disorders), is an absolutely fascinating character whose point of view feels fresh. The glossary of terms at the back is sometimes clever, though it presents few real insights.
Ultimately, Player One operates too much on the surface, lacking the kind of rigorous inquiry one expects from a Massey Lecture.
Review
As always with Coupland, the ideas come thick and fast, they're quirky, often funny and frequently profound... (John Harding Daily Mail 20101023)
As Player One haunts the pages of this book, the ideas and inferences you read will haunt your mind every time you indulge in a modern day convenience, such as filling a vehicle up with gas, making this book a worthy read. (Sarah Purdy The Silo 20101024)
Douglas Coupland takes readers on a captivating ride... (Donna Harris Winnipeg Free Press 20101016)
...there is an odd tenderness to this novel, and it has to do with recapturing the sense of life as a story in a world of information overload and non-linear narratives. (The Guardian 20101114)
The way Coupland moulds his fiction from the throwaway debris of North American popular culture is quite brilliant... (Scarlett Thomas The Guardian 20101014)
"...an ease with the language of modernity that contemporary Great North American Novelists should envy... his Eeyorish pessimism, left-field humour and admirable ability to enunciate all of our halfformed thoughts raise this from a sterile dissertation on why modern life is rubbish into the realms of really great fiction." (Katy Guest The Independent 20101025)
"...an ease with the language of modernity that contemporary Great North American Novelists should envy... his Eeyorish pessimism, left-field humour and admirable ability to enunciate all of our halfformed thoughts raise this from a sterile dissertation on why modern life is rubbish into the realms of really great fiction." (Katy Guest The Independent )
packed full of ideas and always a joy to follow... (Big Issue Scotland )
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good quick read, but not something to read lightly,
This review is from: Player One (Paperback)
Coupland's insights into the human psyche, religion, and societal structures are quite powerful. The points that the book raises are very thought provoking, and that being said, the book is not something to pick up if you're only looking for light reading. I would have to agree with other reviewers in saying that the characters are unrealistically well-spoken throughout the whole book, and Coupland's primary goal of presenting his provoking questions and insights are the main cause of this. As each of his characters are blatant mouthpieces, I found that this book became much more enjoyable when I considered it to be like an academic lecture or debate which was placed within a fictional context. I think readers would appreciate the work more if they took the fiction/story element as a creative way of presenting the information that would otherwise make an essay or lecture. The book also benefits from its short length, as this 'style' of writing may have been crippled had he let the characters and story go on any further than he did.A good read, if you're looking for a piece of fiction to sit down and think about.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Precarious Nature of Humans,
By
This review is from: Player One (Paperback)
Coupland examines our fragility through the insecurities and foibles of individuals and sets Player One against a chilling apocalyptic backdrop. The book provides two avenues that run in parallel and crisscross over a very short and frightening period of time. But what makes it so readable are the characters. Though largely implausible and far too articulate, Coupland provides us with engaging personalities that we cannot help but connect with.These include Karen, the single mom from Winnipeg, who flies across the country to eradicate loneliness, "Karen feels as if her life is a real story, not just a string of events entered into a daybook - false linearity imposed on chaos as we humans try to make sense of our iffy situation here on earth." And her observation that. "A man walks into a bookstore and looks up books on loneliness, and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman looks for books on loneliness, and the store clears out" is an insight both humorous and sad. Luke, the disgraced pastor, "has decided that, although he is a failure, failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine". Luke also believes that the Seven Deadly Sins need to be updated to perhaps include: " the willingness to tolerate information overload; the neglect of the maintenance of democracy; the deliberate ignorance of history; the equating of shopping with creativity; the rejection of reflective thinking; the belief that spectacle is reality; vicariously living though celebrities." This is Coupland at his best when he beats up pop culture and its `dumbing down' of society. And then there is Rachel, though plagued by a laundry list of autistic and other challenges, she portrays a humanity that is clinically inviting. Her bewilderment in a world of "neurotypicals" is not unlike anyone's discomfort except she has been duly labeled. Coupland throws these and other characters together into a terrifying scenario over a period of five hours. In that time they are forced to survive, adapt, reveal their inner fears, question engrained beliefs, and rely on each broken and searching self for answers. They each bring their own "iffy situations" to one very large one and the results are fascinating.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Save yourself a few hours...,
By
This review is from: Player One (Paperback)
The review by "DeadTrees" below is bang-on. I ignored it and read the book anyways. The streaming babble of the characters become unbearable around page 50. The predictable, depressing and melancholy internal narratives all merge into what seems more like a smokescreen for an unimaginative backdrop. Save yourself the time and frustration. This book should be 80 pages long, if published at all.
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