Green Planets (32 page)

 

• Catastrophe is repeated: the novel involves a series and variety of catastrophes.

• Catastrophe is subjective: it is dreamed or imagined, often by a given character—this is one reason for the variety of catastrophes just mentioned, but it is also the point at which relations between the dreamer and the universe can be reimagined and some of the terror of apocalypse can be dispelled.

• Catastrophe is taken for granted: the event is not explained in the novel. Given the way humans behave, the event is too predictable to be worth explanation. If it didn't happen this way it would have happened some other way; it is as if the event has already happened, so that, at least potentially, it is reincorporated into the ordinary, and thus available for comic play.

 

The value of comedy in this context cannot simply be assumed, however. It may be that to make a comic narrative of the way in which catastrophe is a cultural habit is indeed to free us from fear, but the threat of catastrophe remains real, and our situation is often made grimmer by this very habit of imagining catastrophe.
Oryx and Crake
is the case in point, a grim, angry novel in which the ordinary has been corrupted by the banal, by banality of cultural imagination, and catastrophe results.
Girlfriend in a Coma
and
Kraken
are more freely comic, as well as more affectionate in their grasp of the everyday, but both these novels depict worlds in which reality is ungrounded, and the flux of change and crisis threatens to sweep away ordinary values and commitments.

GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA
(1998)

Douglas Coupland's
Girlfriend in a Coma
⁶
reflects the familiarity of narratives of apocalypse in two main ways. First, it does this by staging the end of life as we know it, annihilating all humans except a group of ordinary thirty-something friends in Vancouver. Then it reveals that this has all been faked, at which point they are returned to the moment before the catastrophe and asked to live as
dedicated prophets of change in their restored suburban world. If all fiction of catastrophe is meant to alert us to the dangers of the future and critique how we live in the present, then this one renders the device absolutely naked, running considerable risks in the process, since the revelation that the catastrophe was faked tends to badly strain reader credulity. Second, it refuses a certain kind of dignity and seriousness to both present and future by the way it is written—clever, restless, flippant, mocking the heroic by its vocabulary of brand name and pop culture references.

Girlfriend in a Coma
is very concerned to define its narratee; the reader is asked to become that ultra-contemporary person who is both totally saturated in media, pop, and brand-name culture and is also cynically knowing about it, possibly thoroughly sick of it. Given the novel's unfailing, almost relentless cleverness, and the omnipresence of the conditions that supply the novel's range of image and reference, it is not all that difficult to become this inscribed or desired narratee. Easy recognition of reference and allusion enables you to get the jokes but reminds you that your head is just as full of rubbish as are those of the main characters.

Girlfriend in a Coma
offers a history of a group of suburban, middle-class friends from high school (1978) to early middle age (1997 or thereabouts). They go from the clever flippancy and aimlessness forgivable or even likable in the young to a more desperate clever flippancy and aimlessness not so attractive in thirty-somethings, knowing themselves that this is no longer attractive. Even though some of their decisions in these years show that they want more meaning and a larger perspective, the language of the novel never gets beyond the immediate-contemporary of consumer and pop culture; this being a point-of-view novel, this is their language, the architecture of their minds. Amazing things happen, and Coupland riskily takes on the challenge of making us believe in them: a girl goes into a coma and awakens seventeen years later, fully alert, having experienced visions of an ominous future while she was in coma; the ghost of one of their friends makes increasingly frequent appearances, and in the last part of the novel directs and changes their lives, speaking almost always, however, as the teenage sports star he was when he died; the world ends and all humans on the planet, except the main characters, fall asleep, die, and rot, to the accompaniment of a great deal of turmoil and mayhem.

Coupland sets himself to convey all this, and subsequent revelations and reversals, in the language of brand-name consumerism, comparisons to the shared currency of pop culture: “‘Comas are rare phenomena,' Linus told me once.
‘They're a byproduct of modern living, with almost no known coma patients existing prior to World War Two. People simply died. Comas are as modern as polyester, jet travel, and microchips.'”
⁷
It's not exactly that this range of reference is banal or trivial, though it sometimes is, and both characters and author know it; it's that it all has a use-by date, making for an almost painful clash between the global or anomalous events recounted and the way they are described in the currency of that year's rock group or favorite candy, which almost by definition will not be next year's.

Girlfriend in a Coma
is a risky and almost brutal exploration of the way in which apocalypse narratives are imagined, done so as to critique the present. This time the end of the world as we know it, though detailed with great vigor and made as effectively real as any we might read or see on screen, is simply faked. It is staged by unknown powers who might well be divine but are never investigated, and who use the teenage ghost Jared as their angel. Its purpose is to teach the main characters a lesson. It is a bit of a shock for the reader. Why violently yoke an effective novel about teen slackers-cum-early-middle-age-slackers to a fantastic story of drastic anomalies (a ghost, a seventeen-year coma) and wholesale catastrophe? Why
these
people? They are characterized and fleshed out, but only as characters in a teen/slacker novel might be, so that their ordinariness and their imprisonment in the culture of their time seems problematic in this different context where we have ghosts, a kind of miraculous rebirth after seventeen years, and the end of the world. Yet they are marked as special in being selected as the (apparent) sole survivors, and then in being chosen as prophets of challenge and questioning when it is abruptly revealed that the life of the world will now resume as normal.

Is this outcome to be seen as the apotheosis of that valuation of the ordinary as anomalous and special that we have been tracing, or a kind of parody of it? It can't be the latter, because the novel makes it plain that nothing and no one else can be relied on. We—ordinary but privileged in our prosperity and freedom
⁸
—got ourselves in this mess, and so, absurd as it may seem when we look at ourselves (that is, at Linus and Wendy, Ham and Pam, Richard and Karen and Megan), we ourselves will have to get us out of it.

A good deal depends on the novel's analysis of the contemporary condition, which is seen as going beyond mediocre suburban narrowness or tacky consumer waste or slacker narcissism. It is gradually defined as a kind of absence. This diagnosis emerges in Karen's responses to her friends and the society around them when she revives from her long coma and is asked how she finds things
now: “Her friends have become who they've become by default” (137); the difference between the world she left and the world she returned to is “a lack” (215). There is an emptiness at the center of people's actions.

At one point Richard meditates on dreams: “Dreams have no negative. This is to say that if, during the day, you think about how much you
don't
want to visit Mexico, your dreams at night will promptly take you to Mexico City” (60). Later, he recalls reading Arthur C. Clarke's
Childhood's End
(1953): “In it, the children of Earth conglomerate to form a master race that dreams together, that collectively moves planets. This made me wonder, what if the children of Earth instead fragmented, checked out, had their dreams erased and became vacant. What if instead of unity there was atomisation and amnesia and comas?” (61).

This must be what Karen, in her coma, has glimpsed: “She saw a picture, however fragmentary, that told her that tomorrow was not a place she wanted to visit—that the future was not a place in which to be” (61). Karen's own version of this, after she revives, is more critically pointed: “It's pretty clear to me that life now isn't what it ought to have become” (155).

The people of the present have had wealth and ease and freedom, and they have squandered the future.
⁹
Beneath the
umwelt
of brand names and pop culture, offered half nostalgically and half satirically, is an absence; it is figured in Richard's idea of
Childhood's End
flipped to its negative. It follows from this diagnosis that apocalypse, when it comes, is doubly negative: it is a comprehensive end, marked by death, confusion, and degradation, and with no replacement (no post-apocalyptic society, only a group of friends wasting time)—but it's a fake anyway. Like everything else in the novel, it is imaged in the terms of pop culture. Several of the main characters have been working as technical experts providing fake blood and gore for
TV
and movie producers. Richard, visiting them, opens the wrong door: “Left alone, I wandered round the building and saw a door that was slightly ajar. I opened it, thinking I might find a studio. What I found instead must have been a corpse storage room, a room unlike any I could have imagined—men and women, children and aliens; whole, cut in two, doused in blood; arms and legs stacked like timber; glass bottles of eyes and shelves of noses” (90). Richard could never have imagined this, but his friends did; they even imagined a version of his girlfriend Karen, shrunken and gray-haired in her coma, and Richard stumbles across it. Almost everything has been imagined already, and then turned into cliché, or a pile of grotesque discards in a room, and it is from this that people find themselves perceiving disaster when it comes: “Without warning, the Esso station by the Westview overpass explodes like a
jet at an air show—bodies like ventriloquist dolls puked into the sky as though in a cartoon or an action-adventure film” (188) … “Below them, the fire on the sloping neighbourhood burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert” (262).

Because almost everything has been imagined already, and repeated to the point of cliché, the novel reaches for the extreme and implausible. When the extreme and implausible do come, at this climactic point, in the form of catastrophe, they are captured by the already imagined, or are in danger of being captured by it. Of course we have nothing with which to imagine what has not yet happened but what we have already imagined, but Coupland underlines how banal and mediatized this imagination is: the jet at an air show (already something seen on the
TV
news) becomes something in a cartoon or an action-adventure film. To mention a thing is to mention its brand name, often in our society and always in Coupland; brand names for a second seem so ubiquitous as to be cosmic. A million lighters at a concert (even a Fleetwood Mac concert, even Bic lighters) really would seem grand, but the effect of this is to distract the reader into thoughts about cosmic concerts rather than about the fires of the end of the world.

After he comes across his friends' replica of Karen—“The fallen corpse was now leaning against a wall near an electrical subunit, as though freeze-dried” (91)—Richard drives off: “I wanted to see the real Karen, who only differed slightly from the plastic female replica I'd just seen” (91). It is not so: Karen awakes, becomes a pointed critic of what she sees around her, and, after the crucial revelation that the catastrophe was itself a fake, sacrifices herself and returns to her coma. If everything is to return to what it was before the catastrophe, and life is to resume, then Karen will have to return to her coma—though this doesn't quite follow, since she had revived some time before the catastrophe. Coupland's move here is perhaps gratuitous, but this underlines the lengths he is going to in underlining that our only hope is in the ordinary. Yet this pervasive sense that perception is dogged by what is already known in the form of cliché or familiar pop culture image, and that fakery is at the heart of pop culture, does put the novel under intense pressure. The novel does present a strong social diagnosis: contemporary culture has become hollowed out, a negative, and the future is being squandered. It stages a moral revival that is to be based on the ordinary slackers it centers on. In all this Coupland shares the imaginary of his characters, and makes the reader share it too; he never reaches for some standpoint outside and above the imaginative world of his characters. He accepts that in
very important ways contemporary consumer culture has no outside, and the working out of this is what makes
Girlfriend in a Coma
so challenging, precisely because of its flippancy and brand-name allusiveness, which is, after all, a vital part of the imaginary that Coupland shares with his characters. The result, however, is that the diagnosis and the revival can only find expression in the medium of pop culture familiarity and witticism that threatens to undermine them because it is a symptom of the very condition that is being diagnosed. I don't think it does undermine them, but it's a close shave.

ORYX AND CRAKE
(2003)

Coupland's
Girlfriend
and Miéville's
Kraken
, as we have seen and will see, engage not so much with the real-world possibility (or likelihood) of catastrophe as with the culture of catastrophe, and they set about freeing us from this by exaggerating it. Margaret Atwood's
Oryx and Crake
, in contrast, is a bitter diagnosis of playfulness, an angry condemnation of taking things lightly that imagines this flippancy as a disease of the imagination to which our own culture is horribly subject. In this context, ordinary decency is more powerless than paradoxically strong, and the narrative structure that was observed earlier, whereby the clash between ordinary decency and its antagonist is resolved by an anomalous third term, is muffled (as will be seen when we come to discuss the role of Oryx in the novel).