Hey Nostradamus

Newsnight Review discussed Doulgas Coupland's novel Hey Nostradamus which pans the fifteen years following the fictional Delbrooke School massacre in Vancouver .

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

JUDE KELLY:
It wasn't long ago I read The Lovely Bones which is a book about a girl who's been murdered and she's describing what it is like, not only to die but to be dead. This starts in a similar way, the character who is now dead tells you about how urgently powerful her life was and then what it was like to die and then what she feels like as a sort of spirit in limbo. Then the book goes on really to feature the different survivors of the massacre, and their religiousity or lack of it and the whole book circles around an anger, a terror, a resentment about religious conviction or the lack of it. Godlessness of God's presence. I found it a very disturbing book. It's not what you'd call a good read. It's a difficult read. It's a very cool, almost chilling read. Because it dissects the idea of Godlessness inside oneself and whether forgiveness is available to people or not. At a time when we are surrounded by images of selfishness and violence, to have a writer like him say I want to enter the territory of spirituality and discuss it, I found that very unusual and interesting.

ALISTAIR MCGOWAN:
I hadn't heard of Coupland before at all in my televisual ignorant world but the greatest compliment I could pay this book is that now I would like to go back and read his other work because I thought his writing had good style. Structurally, I thought it was slightly flawed, but the style is very good and he covered a dense and difficult subject with a surprising amount of wit as well, without ever being crass. It brought up a lot of issues, and the main issue, as Jude said, about whether faith can help you through something or if an instant like this destroys your faith. There were no answers in the book which I think is almost problematic but, at the same time, you can't answer those questions, you can only discuss them which is what he does.

KIRSTY WARK:
He does it with a good deal of maturity but veers off into strange things. The Jason character has a meeting with a Russian mobster and it takes a strange handbrake turn. Did you mind that, Will?

WILL SELF:
I mind everything. I think he's trying to bootstrap his way into some level of profundity by setting this over a greater timescale than his previous works which is what you would expect from a writer moving into middle age and appreciating the parallax of time in that way. He has his fictional reconstruction of the Columbine massacre occurring at around the same period and he shoots forward. He deals with a 20-year span. Everybody knows, especially regular viewers of this programme, know fine well that the Columbine massacre not only didn't happen in Canada but could never happen in Canada. Canadians have plenty of guns but they're incredibly polite, kind, well-behaved people, and their kids don't go around..

KIRSTY WARK:
Does it matter?

WILLS SELF:
Yes, it really matters.

KIRSTY WARK:
Why?

WILL SELF:
Because Canadians tend to produce this quiet, kind, urbane literature that for some reason goes down a wow over here but it doesn't hit my nerves. I don't see why he has to hijack his profundity from south of the border. He had to tap into the big, dirty down south in order to give himself a springboard. If he wants to write about issues of God and faith, and everybody's entitled to their opinion, but this was not a book that triggered any of those thoughts or suppositions in me. I thought it was well written, it tootled along. I never found myself thinking wow God or wow the transcendent of anything like that for a second.

JUDE KELLY:
It's interesting what you're saying about Canada. I don't think you can ever second guess that a culture won't have an event like that. We don't have a gun culture but we've had some massacres of our own in Britain. But what was contemporary and important about the book is the idea that there's a lot of born-againness, there's a lot of evangelicalism.

WILL SELF:
The father is a well-drawn character and I liked him as a character. I liked the characters overall, but the father's religious bigotry is described very much as a personal foible, not widened out into a social phenomenon. It isn't the bible-belt phenomenon in Canada.

JUDE KELLY:
I blanked Canada. I have to admit I blanked Canada.

WILL SELF:
Canada is really significant. Here's Coupland trying to be an American writer, he's a Canadian writer.

ALISTAIR MCGOWAN:
It never crossed my mind that difference between the two and if it did happen in a country where that doesn't happen, it makes it all the more poignant that suddenly this is something they have got to cope with.