Generation A

Douglas Coupland's latest novel sees a not to distant world of ours devoid of bees and therefore things like fruit and flowers. A strange drug called Solon is sweeping the planet, it's effects rendering the user carefree and unafraid of the future with a deep inner peace that stops them interacting with other humans and makes them seek solitude. Highly addictive, the drug is wiping out human creativity as well as the bees. Five people, seemingly random, across the planet are stung by bees. They are suddenly whisked away for testing and become instant global celebrities. Shortly after being released back into the world they are recaptured and taken to a remote island off the coast of Canada and made to tell stories, the idea being something in the telling of stories releases a protein into their blood and the mixture could become a cure for Solon. Well, damn the negative reviews, I loved it! "Generation A" mixes two of Coupland's strengths - his humour like in "Microserfs" and "jPod", and his humanity like in "Eleanor Rigby" - together with his visions of a not too far off society. The result is his best book to date. If you've read Coupland before you'll know his love of employing gimmicks into his stories. The reams of numbers in "jPod" or the novel within a novel in "The Gum Thief" or the new dictionary slang of "Generation X" - in "Generation A" the second half is taken up by short stories told by the characters. While this might irk some (short stories are notoriously niche) let me tell you the stories are brilliant. They not only fit into the themes of the book but are great stories to be enjoyed for the sake of stories. I won't go into too much depth here but what I got from Coupland was his message of humans telling stories to humans is what makes us human. While Solon (so alone?) is a sort of futuristic drug like Huxley's Soma that induces in the user the feeling of having read a thousand books in an hour, telling stories engages the teller and the listener in the present and keeps us together. The overall message is of stories and company and how this is the only antidote to the growing isolation of humans as a result of the tidal wave of technology. Read without any subtext, the book is a joy for the reader and a masterclass in writing from Coupland. The pacing is kept up throughout and the world he portrays, while different, retains an odd sense of familiarity. It's accessible for new readers and old and while Coupland has his ups and downs (to be expected from a writer whose approaches and ideas to novels changes from one book to the next) this is most certainly a brilliant book and probably his best. Amazing stuff, highly recommended.

Disclaimer: I am reviewing an advance unproofread copy I got for free through the Vine program. I am really enjoying this book, way more than I'd expected to, so it is definitely a pleasant surprise discovery. I haven't read anything else by this author, yet (but I will probably follow up, by buying and reading his earlier novel). I'm not going to give spoilers so I won't mention any specific plot details. But it is an interesting story, definitely sci-fi but not too far (not offworld, not space opera, ... just a few years ahead of us), told in an engrossing style that weaves together several people's stories. And it's really funny sometimes, funny in a good way, natural funniness of the characters and their outlooks on life.

Here's a funny thing about Douglas Coupland: he's one of my favorite authors because I adore his writing style, but I've never considered a novel of his worthy of a five star rating. They always make me laugh and ponder life's big questions, but they also end up missing something that would solidify them as all-around satisfying reads. Coupland excels at creating memorably quirky outlines of characters, but he seldom manages to dig deep enough to make us really believe that they are flesh and blood or to get us to really care about them. In GENERATION A, he introduces 5 20-somethings from around the globe who are all stung by bees, years after bees were thought to be extinct. However, with the exception of Harj, an amusingly clever call center employee from Sri Lanka (and my favorite character by far), all of them speak in a near identical "Coupland" voice: witty, emotionally distant, and very self-aware. Coupland is also known for his outlandish plots, liberal use of pop-culture references, and willingness to experiment with structure. This one strikes me as a mix of GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA (for the post-apocalyptic elements) and GENERATION X (for the inclusion of a bunch of loosely related short stories a la The Decameron in the second half). It comes together (sort of) in the end, and we learn how these seemingly random individuals are related and what it means for the future of the human race. Ultimately, I enjoyed reading it - though once again, I didn't love it. I'm still waiting on that elusive perfect Coupland novel...

The stories we tell ourselves define us--in fact, they're so important they can save the world. And when we stop telling them, stop reading them, stop caring, we become a planet of zombies, doomed to destroy ourselves. That's the far-fetched, but never heavy-handed, message of Generation A, a vigorous return to form for Douglas Coupland that updates his tale of disaffection for a new generation. The story revolves around five young people around the globe, each of whom is stung by a bee. No big deal--except that bees have gone extinct. There are no flowers, fruit is a hand-pollinated luxury item, and almost everyone is addicted to watching old YouTube videos or playing World of Warcraft--and to a new drug that can make people stop caring about the future. Why were the five young people stung? This mystery propels the book forward at a galloping pace; I tore through its 300 pages in two days. The message is subtle but unmistakable; dark humor populates every page, but Coupland has serious, timely concerns, and he's created one hell of a page-turner to convey them.

I once read a short story by Douglas Coupland in McSweeney's about the end of the world from the perspective of a reality TV cameraman, and his humor and non-paranoiac style of apocalypse was very entertaining to me. Reading the description for this book made it seem like it was just for me. And to a degree, it is, because after all, I read books. In Douglas Coupland's new novel, Generation A, the ultimate theme is that book readers have a power over apocalypse. Go figure. Five different characters get stung by bees, in roughly the course of a month. They are from different countries, but they live in an era where bees are extinct, so this is more than just a mild irritant--it's downright World-redemption level news. Luckily--or, more appropriately, FATEFULLY--they get stung at a moment when they are in direct digital communication with the wider world. This is just one of the simple similarities between them that bring them together--or, more appropriately, get them BROUGHT together, because of course there's some power and influence and money behind this (there always is). What the book then becomes is something like a new generation of the Decameron. The five characters, all of different personalities and backgrounds, have to tell stories to each other, and the stories represent who they are individually as well as what they all share, and what they all share could be the key to repollinating the world. The book itself is very self-aware, with the narrators all telling the separate stories to the audience as well as to each other, a lot of musings on the peculiarities of English language (even though two of the characters speak other languages, they still speak predominantly in English without translation), and anything from hints that Joyce's Finnegan's Wake holds a linguistic key to complete freedom to the idea that ultimately it's the people with the most solitude that are best able to create a hive-like mentality for World Peace. But whatever the case, it's fun storytelling. It's also a really quick and easy read. Despite its 300 pages, I was able to knock this thing out over the course of a couple of hours of a couple of days. In a way, it's really structured more like the short stories the characters tell in the second half of the novel than it is like a full-length novel. It's pretty easy to read this book on the fly and buzz right through it (sorry, couldn't help the puns). --PolarisDiB