Generation A by Douglas Coupland

There’s a sense in which it is pointless to review a Douglas Coupland novel. When casting about for some non-SF to read recently, I realised that I (a) couldn’t remember which Coupland novels I owned and (b) couldn’t remember which ones I’d read, because (c), they all blur into one.

Which is not to say that there is no pleasure in reading his books, just that he’s so zeitgeisty that every single iteration of his works bears the same relation to our contemporary culture. He’s always just ahead of the leading edge, surfing the wave of our so-called progress, reflecting it back at us with a parabolic mirror in a tight laser-like beam.

Read Microserfs and then read JPod. It almost seems like the same book, with the same set of characters, except somehow things have taken a much darker turn, like life. Coupland seems to like his characters to come in fives: each a collective hive mind which merges into one – like his books.

Clearly, Generation A is meant to make us think about Generation X. The annoying thing about Generation X was the way in which Coupland’s invisible post-boomer generation was overlooked (again) by the media in favour of a younger, more attractive demographic. In the media, “Generation X” came to stand for Bright Young Hipster Twentysomethings. Advertisers are interested in the under-25s, so that’s what the media went for. Generation X was about the neither-fish-nor-foul people whose cultural identity has been subsumed by the overwhelming numbers of the baby boom and by the inherent sexiness of those born more recently.

Coupland clearly wants to start again, beginning Generation A with an epigraph from Vonnegut, in which the X-stands-for-invisible is misinterpreted as X-stands-for-penultimate, implying that the Generations Y and Z that followed would be the last. In this construction, Generation X is an apocalyptic novel about the approaching end times. Generation A, taking its lead from Vonnegut, offers to wipe the slate clean, implying that endings can also be beginnings.

Generation A begins with this premise: all the bees are gone. The bee apocalypse is probably harder for people to get their heads round than the climate apocalypse. The idea that food crops won’t be pollenated is too scary to even contemplate. In a world without bees, apples become a mind-boggling luxury. It’s not just that we’d have to go without things, but that we’d have to live with the knowledge that it would be our fault: we killed the bees. That’s like waking up in the morning and realising you’re Hitler. I have trouble convincing students that the reason why so much of the world hates and resents the British is that for a couple of hundred years of colonial expansion, invasion, and imperialism, we were the bad guys. Our former colonies have a few hundred years to go before their future Monty Python equivalents can make jokes about “What the British did for us” without wanting to blow something up.

Generation A is narrated by five individuals from different parts of the globe, each of whom is stung by a (supposedly extinct) bee. The puzzle is to work out what happened and why. Why these people? In seeking the answer, we encounter a version of our society, the one we live in, with its instantaneous global village communications and Asian call centres and its tendency to want to solve problems with drugs.

One drug in particular, Solus, acts on the brain’s chemistry in ways which make its users feel okay about being alone. It creates a sense of pleasure in solitude, the kind you get when you’re all “peopled out” from all the clamour and noise, and want to spend some time on your own. With solus, you feel that way all the time. Happy to live a separate life, not hankering for human contact or love, not worrying about your children or parents. Solus creates the same sense of contentment in solitude that avid readers get when consuming a novel.

The point that Coupland makes is that we keep volunteering for this stuff. We voluntarily consume the products of intensive industrial agriculture – even if it means the bees are dying. Some of us volunteer to drive over-sized cars even though the oil is running out. A small percentage of us volunteer to do most of the air travel, which is supposed to be Bad For The Planet. But instead of stopping it, somehow, we defend its right to continue.

More disturbingly, we’re being socially engineered by our gadgets. Who hasn’t checked a text or taken a phone call from a distant person whilst in the presence of someone else? We value the distractions our gadgets bring us, interacting with our friends via electronic means. We stick earbuds in our ears and hope nobody sits next to us on the train. We drive our children to school instead of letting them walk or take the bus. We’re all becoming more and more addicted to Solus, and we can’t turn it off.

Generation A, like all Coupland books, is at times very funny, but it’s reflected beam of light-from-the-future is piercingly accurate. Recommended.

The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré

The Constant Gardener (published 2001) is of course one of the many Le Carré books which have been filmed. Didn’t catch the film myself, and the PVR fucked up when it was on TV recently.

Justin Quayle is in many ways a typical unlikely Le Carré hero. An unimportant man, as they say, a mid-level diplomat – not even a spy, not even pretending – who seems from the outside to be living a life of quiet, cuckolded, desperation as his much younger wife flirts at parties and gads about with her African lover.

Based in Nairobi, Quayle tends his garden and puts in his 9 to 5 at the British High Commission, ignored or sneered at by his colleagues – and particularly by his line manager Sandy Woodrow, a serial adulterer who has feelings for Quayle’s lovely wife Tessa and has asked her to elope with him.

Meanwhile Tessa pours her energy into aid work, supporting the women of Kenya as much as she can, and causing the occasional diplomatic embarrassment when her passions take her “too far”.

But then she turns up dead, with the African/Belgian doctor whom everybody assumes was her lover, in an out-of-the-way spot up country. Quayle is sequestered in Woodrow’s house to protect him from the press, and after the funeral is quietly ushered to the airport to take a leave of absence back in Blighty.

What’s brilliant about this is that Le Carré introduces us to Quayle (and his tragic marriage) as others see him. We see him through Woodrow’s eyes, and through Sandy’s wife Gloria’s eyes. We see part of the British police investigation, the behind the scenes manoeuvrings. Quayle is meek, mild, undemonstrative, unimpressive, living entirely within himself. Sandy himself seems more affected by Tessa’s horrible death, and we learn why, as he obsesses about her lovely face, her beautiful silhouette through her clothes against a backlit window.

One vignette tells us all we need to know about Tessa and the obsessive Woodrow. In hospital following the still-birth of her child, Sandy comes upon Tessa as she breastfeeds a sick Kenyan woman’s baby because the living baby’s mother is too sick to do so. That’s Tessa, putting her own grief aside to help a sister in need. Meanwhile, Sandy stands over her ogling her breasts and getting hot under the collar, convinced that her wanton display of boob means that she’s gagging for it.

And before you know it, you’re almost 200 pages into a 560-page novel, and then – at last – you start to learn something about the sidelined Justin Quayle’s inner self. It seems to be such a bold stroke, to withhold – and withhold – Justin’s point of view, for a third of the length of the book. And then you get it, not all at once, but slowly and painfully, you realise the strength of the marriage, of the love between Justin and Tessa. You learn how Gloria has fallen for Sandy, because she perceives his inner strength; how Tessa’s friend Ghita has fallen for Sandy, and how Tessa’s supposed lover was… well, spoiler alert.

So now Justin does what unlikely Le Carré heroes do. He stubbornly refuses to fit his stereotype, and manages to follow his wife’s footsteps as he investigates the causes of her death. We’re talking Big Pharma, big profits, and the endless exploitation of Africa by unscrupulous corporations. Le Carré adds in a note at the end that the truth is far, far worse than his fiction.

It’s not easy, and it’s not a slick operation, but Justin has some help along the way; still, ultimately he’s fighting the kind of implacable foe who will not be defeated. Le Carré is as angry as ever, but more gentle – in the way of Quayle – than he has been in other recent titles like Absolute Friends. The power of these corporations, the governments they’ve corrupted, the unlikeliness of any happy outcome – ever – makes for a profoundly depressing outlook, but the sheer poetry of Justin’s dogged determination – his constancy indeed – provide the possibility of something to be redeemed from this world.

This is not sentimental. We’re not meant to leave this with a warm feeling about the few good people there are in the world. We’re supposed to realise that some victories – even the most comprehensive triumphs of the powerful – are sick and hollow and that the closeted lives we lead as beneficiaries of developing world exploitation are part of the sickness.

Highly recommended.