Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland

 HEY NOSTRADAMUS! - DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I saw Douglas Coupland years ago at a book launch and found him reassuringly weird, like a cross between Talking Heads' David Byrne and Hannibal Lector. He was also unexpectedly witty, charming and self-effacing. Rather than simply talking about his latest book and reading extracts from it he instead conducted an interview with himself, answering a series of questions he thought it might be interesting to ask of himself. He was a funny guy. Very stiff, very composed, very paranoid.

An interesting thing about Coupland and indeed an almost unusual thing about him as a writer is how steeped he is in modern day pop culture, evidenced for example in the way he has used a Smiths song title - Girlfriend In A Coma - as a title for one of his books and even this one - Hey Nostradamus! - which is an echo of The Fall song Hey Luciani. However, whilst The Fall song concerns itself with the death of Pope John Paul I, Coupland's book is about a high school shooting.

It's divided into four parts, each part being voiced by a different narrator and by the time you're half-way into the first, you've realised just how good a book this is as it dawns upon you that the narrator is actually dead, a victim of the shooting. Weaving between the tale of her secret Las Vegas wedding at aged seventeen, her school life, and a description of the massacre, the narrator questions the point of there being a God if such events happen and so catapults the story into a whole other sphere. It's brilliantly done, with an honesty and deftness of touch that is rare.

The second narrator is the husband of the first, talking from the vantage point of being a widower and expressing himself in the form of a letter addressed to the children of his dead brother's wife. Not only does he describe what he witnessed on the day of the shooting and the trauma of cradling his dead wife's bloodied body but also the background to his relationship with her, his relationship with his religiously fanatical father and in the weeks following the massacre how he himself was suspected of being the mastermind behind it, fuelled by gossip and insinuation from the bible study group his wife once belonged to. It's not a pretty picture and religion doesn't come out of it well at all. There is also a totally unexpected twist to the narration when he reveals the children of his dead brother to whom he's addressing his letter are actually his.

The third narrator is the new partner of the second narrator whom he's ended up in a relationship with a few years after the massacre has taken place. She's also going through personal trauma as her partner has suddenly gone missing, believed to be dead. It's made the news because of who he is - the husband of one of the high school shooting victims who at one point had been suspected of masterminding the whole thing. It's a convoluted story involving loneliness, analogues and psychic messages but it makes sense, and it works.

The fourth and final narrator is the aforementioned religiously fanatical father who addresses his missing son in the form of a letter to him which he nails copies of to trees - like Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the doors of a church - in the hope a copy might one day be read by him when Sasquatch-like he emerges from hiding in the woods. Of all the narrators, and what with him being supposedly the closest to God, the father is the loneliest, the most wretched and the most desperate. God, as Douglas Coupland seems to be confirming, is merely a concept by which we measure our pain.

Ultimately, Hey Nostradamus! is about loss in a godless world. It's a riff on the modern age where randomness and atomisation are the grist to the mill and trying to make sense of the senselessness is akin to a ticking timebomb that mostly fizzles out in a sad, silent whimper but that sometimes explodes in wanton and inexplicable violence whose ripples course through society leaving some slightly wet and others drowned. Hey Nostradamus! is a worthwhile read and though it doesn't offer any answers and nor does it pretend or even attempt to, it poses plenty of questions.

John Serpico