A cry from the void

A few years ago I picked up a book by Douglas Coupland which promised me more one-liners in the first 50 pages than in a decade of Woody Allen films.

So it proved. And yet in the midst of the humour there was a cry - a cry for something, someone, somewhere.

Douglas Coupland shot to fame in 1991 through his first novel, Generation X. Since then he has written seven more novels - all strangely with the same cry for something, someone more, than is here and now. His books capture the spirit of the age and brim with 'consumer brands and pop-cultural name checks' as he uses the everyday things of life to make his novels live for Generation Xers.

Hey Nostradamus

I attended a Foyles-Flamingo sponsored event at the UCL Bloomsbury on September 2 where Coupland was talking about himself and reading from his new novel, Hey Nostradmus!

There were hundreds of young people there. The theatre was teeming with them; the event was sold out, and they were writing a list of those who wanted to take advantage of Standing Room only. At 45, I was perhaps the oldest person there! There were tee-shirts with statements, haircuts with attitude, jeans below the waist line and jeans well over the trainers. And hundreds of them sat there waiting for the 'crowned king of North American pop culture' to speak. I felt a bit like Ezekiel, sitting among them, overwhelmed; and I wondered, if I had just five minutes to talk to this audience about the Truth, which text would I use? What would I say?

Hear what is truth

The lights went down and Douglas appeared; tall, smart and infuriatingly quietly spoken. And yet they hung on his every word. He was funny and clever; and not in the least bit rude or offensive. He answered questions that had been emailed to him and revealed a little of his heart; not much but a little. He described his novels as 'shrieks from the void.' Not just his latest one, but all of them! There's the cry I sensed in his books. His grandparents were Bible-thumpers, his parents were not, and he is wondering what the truth is. Every book he writes is a cry from the void he lives in; meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless, without God. He lives without God. One of his books is titled Life after God and yet his latest book is publicised on his website as 'God is nowhere - God is now here.'

Amazingly, the epigram at the front of his new book is 1 Corinthians 15.51-52, which he actually read out to us: 'Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.' But though he read it and though he used it, there was not even a kilobyte of hope from him or in that building that night.

And so, in place of hope, Generation X must have experiences now; and 'purchased experiences don't count,' so we must have our own. This we were promised even on entry to the theatre as we read a handwritten note from Doug: 'Please have your mobile phone set so that when the moment comes (and it will), you can play its ring tone over and over loudly. I'm serious. Thanks, Doug.' What a promise!

That's it

The Moment will surely come when you can play your ring tone over and over! You could sense the collective excitement as people read this note and were preparing their mobiles for The Moment! And right at the end of the evening The Moment came. Doug ordered the lights down and told us to be ready to play and play our ring tones; to close our eyes and to listen and to see where it takes us! We did - it was an amazing noise as hundreds of various ring tones sounded around the building; then after three or four minutes Doug spoke again to close the evening, and said something like 'That was beautiful, I hope you enjoyed the experience.' And it was over. And that's it! That's it. An experience of sitting in the dark listening to hundreds of ring tones as the climax of the evening!

Together those tones made the 'shriek from the void'... and we poured out of the theatre, into the night air, into a godless city; a people of no hope still shrieking from the void of an empty experience, crying for something, for someone more than they know.

And the text I would have used? By the end I knew - 1 Corinthians 15. 51,52. A promise given from the fullness of God, a promise of resurrection experience, of change, of eternity. Surely it's the resurrection truth that Generation X needs to hear?

Paul Pease attends the Douglas Coupland Event

Hey Nostradamus

Hear what is truth

That's it

Paul Pease

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