By JK, on December 7th, 2010 A former pastor, a middle aged woman out for romance, and a severely autistic woman walk into an airport bar. So begins Douglas Coupland’s Massey Lecture-cum-novel Player One, and it’s not a joke — it might be the end of the world.
Coupland presents us with a novel in five acts, in which each section’s narrative is told and re-told from five different perspectives — the three aforementioned characters, the bartender, and the mysterious god-like perspective of Player One. Each character’s narrative (except Player One’s) is further divided into a piece told in the present tense and a portion told in past tense. To further complicate matters, Player One cryptically narrates the future, explaining what will happen in the next act. The effect is jarring, with the reader looping around the same events in an attempt to move forward in each act, before being abruptly thrust into the future by Player One. But there’s a point to all these temporal acrobatics, for Player One is a novel deeply concerned with time. Time is presented as our most precious commodity, even more valuable than oil, though the rising prices of this precious fossil fuel are what precipitate modern society’s collapse in Coupland’s [...]
By JK, on July 12th, 2010 Just a couple pages into her first novel, Annabel, Kathleen Winter writes, “Some know, from birth, that their homeland has a respiratory system, that it pulls energy from rock and mountain and water and gravitational activity beyond Earth, and that it breathes energy in return. And that others don’t know it.”
The land be described is Labrador, a place that was once a dark zone in my imagination, dominated by a general sense of darkness and cold. Yet after reading this enchanting novel, I could not feel more differently. For Winter breathes life into every bush, every bird of this formidable island, inflating it with her reverence, evoking a hidden, but essential life force that pulses through all of Annabel.
It’s a secret energy as well, known only to those with the patience and the sensitivity to seek it. For this is a book of secrets, ones buried deep in places we hide from others and even from ourselves. The most obvious example of this lies in Annabel’s protagonist, Wayne Blake, a inter-sex child raised as a male by his parents who fear there is no place for a son-daughter in 1960s Croyden Harbour. In this small coastal town, men’s and women’s [...]
With the first line of Heaven Is Small, Emily Schultz takes the rather unconventional approach of offing her protagonist. It’s an attention grabber to be sure, but what’s even more interesting is not that he’s floating in the cotton-candy afterlife of Peter Jackson’s wet dreams, but rather that it seems life is going on as usual. We meet Gordon Small moments after his death, an event to which he remains oblivious, as he doggedly searches for new employment.
He finds that employment as a proofreader with the Heaven Book Company, the world’s largest romance publisher. Not very long after his days are consumed by sultry sultans and tempestuous virgins, Gordon starts to realize that something is quite wrong with Heaven Inc. (beyond its questionable creative output), and eventually surmises that not only is he dead, but so are all his coworkers, and that they are all unwitting slaves to Heaven’s corporate agenda.
Gordon Small himself is fairly unremarkable. Pre-mortem, he was washed up by middle age — a joke shop owner, failed writer, and melancholy divorcee without a dash of personal drive or engrossing eccentricity. He makes the everyman look like an overachiever. But as he formulates a plan to take Heaven [...]
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