Millennial Angst (Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland)

Member Name: Salz

Product:	Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland
Date:	29/10/02 (318 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very well written, Doesn't disppear into detial like some Coupland books, Gripping

Disadvantages: Can't think of any!

What do you do after the end of the world? What if you lived on, you and a few friends guided by the ghost of your earliest friend who had died years before in High School? Girlfriend in a Coma is a book that asks these kind of questions. Serious almost unimaginable questions.

Its biggest question is this: What do you do if your girlfriend and the mother of your miraculous child goes into a coma for twenty years? This is the question Richard has been trying to answer or at least understand since Karen fell into a coma at a high school party the evening after they made love for the very first time.

This is not Richard and his set of Vancouver friends first encounter with illness and hospitals. Jared, a promising football (as in Gridiron) player had keeled over in a School match just a few years before and declined rapidly, ding of Leukaemia in three months.

The group cope with their lot in different ways. Hamilton jokes his way through life, takes nothing seriously except drugs. Pam becomes a glamour model and lives the high life before burning out and returning to the old neighbourhood. Wendy throws herself into her work as a doctor in A and E. Linus disappears from his solid job as an engineer to wander the deserts of the USA. He too comes back.

Karen's mother Lois collects Owl figurines, obsesses about everything and tries to find in Richard and Karen's daughter Megan a replacement for her lost child. George, Karen?s' father remains a faithful visitor to her bedside in the nursing home.

If you think this must be building to something, you would be right. But you will have to read the book to find out. Anything I say about it here could never do it justice.

When I read this book for he first time I could hardly put it down. I would wander around the kitchen reading just that little bit more of it instead of getting on with washing up or getting something to eat. For those two or three days it went e
verywhere with me. It is always an exhilarating experience to find a book that drags you in like that. Something that you can't put down. A book that takes you back to your early childhood, when books were magical objects that cast a spell over everything around them.

STYLE:

Douglas Coupland is his usual minutely observant, anecdotal self but here his canvas is spread broader than in most of his other novels. This is a book about the end of the world as it appears to a small group of people and the choice of language tells you that. The fact that this is set in Coupland's native Vancouver comes through strongly.

CONTENT:

Not too much to offend here. It is an adults book aimed at adults, beyond that I would say it is fairly safe for all but the most squeamish (there are dead bodies, drug overdoses, and so on).

Far more difficult is the question of where on the contemporary fiction spectrum the book lies. Speculative vs Realistic. Of course the book is set now (in fact in the years between 1979 and 1997) in a real place with realistically described people and places. But is also a book with ghosts and the end of the world. Personally in my slightly partisan view it is a great work of Speculative Fiction (the umbrella term invented by Orson Scott Card to cover Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Slipstream, just about anything which doesn't look exactly like the world we know and love).

Like many great works of this kind before it does not simply change names and give us a bland soap opera set in a space station/castle/jungle/alien planet. Rather it takes the here and now as a jumping off point to fly into realms beyond the present and he actual. But also it does so not to escape in a head in the sand way but rather to show up our current life and existence all the more clearly.

Not all great works of SF do the first (some start farther away). All great works of literature (in their own infinite
ly varied ways) do the second.

Well that's my twopenn'orth. Mr Coupland would probably object to my description of his work but who is to say he's right? ;)

Although this is one of my favourite books of all time I realise it will not be everyone's thing I would beg of all of you. Try it. You won't know unless you try it. (If DC would see his way to paying me commission for these sales it would be much appreciated ;) ).

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