| 01 September 2009
RBS Main Theatre
30 August 20.00
Normally on entering an event such as this you are reminded, or rather told, to turn all mobile devises off. It would be in Douglas Coupland’s allotted hour that roughly 600 people were asked to swap numbers with someone nearby and ring each other to create a Cell Phone Sonata!
While a marquee full of adults played like children, I was struck by how quickly everyone moved on from Coupland’s explanation of his inspiration for this ‘game’: the ensemble of phones ringing out in the abandoned dining hall after the Columbine massacre, which according to police, sounded like humming birds.
This was the beginning of 60 minutes worth of tech talk, though the subsequent 59 were rather more ordered and had fewer polyphonic sound effects. All the while, Coupland’s humour and enthusiasm were underpinned by a skepticism, and very real concern for the effects of the technological advances that have provided him with fodder for his thriving literary career.
Quick to grasp the ironies surrounding him, Coupland observed: “Things are changing right now, here we are at the Edinburgh literary festival, and we are celebrating the act of writing. It’s sponsored by a bank, which has been brought down by…the whole online universe…it seems like everything in our world is up for grabs. I think artists are the canaries in the coal mine. When I saw Damien Hirst and that stupid platinum skull with all the diamonds, I just knew the meltdown was coming.” The audience roared but the joke had the edge of anything that cuts a little too close to the quick.
This, from what I heard, seems to be the prevalent tone of Coupland’s latest novel: Generation A. Set 20 years on from his hugely successful, Generation X, he describes Generation A as a ‘transitional’ work; a re-exploration of how technology since 1989 has affected story-telling, namely the narrative arc. The audience was treated to two extracts: ‘Superman and the Kryptonite Martini’ and ‘Zoe Hears the Truth,’ both of which he tells in that Canadian drawl, that at times barely musters a tone of indifference, yet falls upon a punch line like a ton of bricks.
These extracts, like their author are hugely entertaining, yet tinged with unsettling insight into a world that has become too apathetic to undo the damage done. Equally full of endearing anecdotes and witty asides, as he is with precise observations and acute insight, Douglas Coupland looks set to keep rousing his readers with light humour, albeit barbed with weighty implications.
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