marramgrass

Caution: may contain spoilers.

After much excitement and anticipation (I like this guy’s writing), I finally got my hands on the new Douglas Coupland, Hey, Nostradamus!.

I finished it this morning before I got out of bed (don’t you love it when your day off rolls around), and it’s left me a little unsure of what to make of it. A little frustrated, perhaps, and mildly dissatisfied. And rather depressed.

It’s a tale in four voices: Cheryl, the seventeen-year-old victim of high-school shooting spree (narrating her own death in a touchingly calm manner); Jason, her widower (secretly married in high school) who eleven years later is still trying to make peace with her death; Heather, Jason’s girlfriend whose life is taken over by Jason’s mysterious disappearance; and Reg, Jason’s unloving and unlovely father who is struggling to find solace in his own particularly extreme and graceless version of evangelical Christianity.

Some comment has been made on how Coupland draws inspiration from the shootings at Columbine, reading his emphasis on the consequences of the event rather than it’s causes as an offensively wasted opportunity for exploration. I find that the persistent reading alongside Columbine slightly misses the point. The beginning of this novel could have been any senseless disaster: the plane crash of Miss Wyoming, a road accident, the chemical clash of Girlfriend In A Coma. Coupland does not set out to analyse that massacre (a la Michael Moore). Instead, he seeks to explore the myriad persistent, subtle and not-so-subtle, effects the untimely loss of a loved one can have on a person and consequently on those who know and love that person. Here the central character is Jason, not Cheryl. Coupland merely uses the dramatic nature of the loss as a way to introduce still other threads: take, for instance, Jason’s inability to go unrecognised in his hometown of Vancouver as the cleared survivour-hero-suspect. This is not a novel about Columbine.

Coupland is sharp, observant, and witty (but never insenstive). His writing can tend towards the slightly abstract and detached, and I was caught off guard by how affecting this novel can be emotionally. The most well-developed character is Jason, and we feel his loss at Cheryl’s death, and his pain at the betrayal of his church youth group. For that is the other main talking-point of Nostradamus: faith that doesn’t stand up to grief, and that is largely a tool for self-gratification. The members of Jason’s and Cheryl’s youth group are judgemental, disgusting and disgraceful. Reg’s zeal has rendered him a monster. Jason has looked here and not found what he needs. As a Christian, I react to these themes with dismay - not because I am offended, but because I recognise the caricature painted as one based firmly in reality. I am merely glad that that reality is born out of man’s weakness and sin and repeated inability to live up to God’s grace, rather than the grace that God has treated us with, and with which we must in turn treat each other.

The difference I see here from Coupland’s earlier work is that in among the bleakness and the suffering, in Nostradamus I cannot find any hope. By the last page, Reg is longing and believing that he will be reunited with his missing son, but the reader cannot believe that this will ever happen. But this is the frustration and dissatisfaction, as well - the ending is just ambiguous enough to leave us unsure, but not ambiguous enough to actually let us hope for the best. The Russian mobster sub-plot really is the wrong peg to hang it all on.

This is still a book I will recommend. It depresses me and dissatisfies me, but in a way it perhaps intends to. It encourages me to think. And I am always grateful for an honest mirror held up to the Church.

(Reflection and review elsewhere.)

Puts things in perspective when I realise I’m in the richest 4.78% of people in the world. What about you?

(Nod to Mig.)

Last night I had my first chance to catch Bruce Cockburn live, at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. I think he gets the inaugural spot on my list of “Artists it should be compulsory to hear live.”

He didn’t have a band with him - it was just Bruce and his acoustic guitars, with some backing vox and keys/accordion from a lady by the name of Julie Wolf - but the only thing you’d notice is how it lets the man’s guitar playing shine out like it should. I like live music, a lot. I don’t catch as much as I’d like to. But I can say without worrying at all that Cockburn is the best guitarist I’ve heard live. Full on rhythmic accompaniment from that one instrument. The occasional jaw-dropping lead break, as well. And I never would have thought of putting an acoustic instrument through a tremolo; but, then, I’m not Bruce Cockburn (and as a particular fan of The Charity Of Night, in my head his sound is at least partly defined by proper use of that effect). It works well.

As far as the songs are concerned, I was made happy pretty early on when he did Pacing The Cage (its delicious bleakness and powerful imagery make it one of my all time favourite cuts, not to mention the beautiful guitar part), which left me free to enjoy a range of tracks from the new album - which I really must get round to finding a copy of. The title track, You’ve Never Seen Everything, is classic Bruce: spoken word over a tense groove, assailing and assaulting the listener with some truly harrowing imagery that is still shot through with a sense of radical hope. For more politicising, see the likes of Trickle Down and the classic If I Had A Rocket Launcher, a song I have more of a taste for in this live, acoustic form.

This is a gig I’d been looking forward to since I heard about it at the start of the summer, and I’m glad to have joined the select (committed, fanatical, familial) crowd of UK live Bruce devotees. May this be the first of many.

What theologian are you?

A creation of Henderson

You’ll recall my recent post on the wonderful time I’m having sorting out a new mobile phone. Since then, I got a phone call back from the helpful Northern Irish girl saying it was done and I could try again.

Well, would you believe, I tried again and my order was declined again on the grounds of address problems. Yay. Tried again and the order went through, but the phone was delivered today to the wrong address. (This was the fault of the O2 types rather then Securicor, as it was addressed wrongly.) Unfortunately, by the time I had tracked it down, the guy who had taken delivery of it had taken it to the Post Office and sent it back to O2, which they will inflexibly take as cancellation of my shiny new contract. So, the guy I was talking to tried to put a fresh order through, and - you guessed it - it stalled on my address. Last attempt was a manager is trying to get it put through manually. Going on my experiences of the last ten days, I don’t hold out much hope of them even contacting me to let me know either way.

I’ve pretty much had enough of this. Do these people not want my money? Also, all these credit checks in just over a week aren’t going to help when we go next week to apply for a mortgage.

Actually quite worried about that one. Will let you know.

After running the most detailed diagnostic offered by Maxtor (a full low-level format of the drive - 120 GB in seven and a half hours):

“Congratulations! Your drive has been re-written with zeroes.”

Okay, I’ll admit I laughed very hard.

I’m starting to wonder if the computer built from begged and cheap parts is more of a false economy. It’s being very temperamental at boot time, complaining of disk read errors that chkdsk can’t fix. The hard disk manufacturer’s diagnostic software doesn’t find anything wrong with the disk, so I’m now trying to swap out components in decreasing order of cheapness. That is, I just put in a new IDE cable ;-) If it deosn’t work, I think I probably will drop this big noisy box out the window. And we live on the top floor.

So, Peet (best man and all-round good mate) left yesterday morning at some ill-advised hour for Cleveland, where he’ll be spending the next year studying business on the ticket of the British Government (Northern Ireland Division). ‘S funny, thinking that’s Peet away for a bit, and our paths are not hugely likely to cross in the next year. A visit (us to him, of course!) would be nice, but between a junior doctor’s holidays and the financial implications I don’t know how likely that is. We can hope, though.

Enjoy it, man.

Just noticed something. The decal on the ‘S’ key on my keyboard is upside-down (top-heavy). I just know you’ll sleep better tonight for knowing that.

These mobile phone things - they can be expensive. Mine has certainly become so. I used to scorn people who informed me that the greater part of their expenditure was on text messages, yet lately I have become one of them. To the tune of twenty squid a month. No, I don’t know how, but my measly allowance of 25 inclusive texts per month disappears very rapidly. I’ve looked at the O2 bolt-on thing, and shopped around, and come to the depressing realisation that it will be cheaper for me to get one of their web-only tariffs (500 of the little things, you see) and pay out my old contract alongside it than it would be to stick it out over my minimum term. There’s something essentially unjust about that. There is madness enough in that, you may think.

But wait! I attempt to order up a nice shiny new phone (an Ericsson T610, no less) with a nice cheap tariff, and stall at the order page. Credit check, blah blah, addresses, blah blah, postcodes, etc. Bung in my postcode and house number, machine goes and looks up the fact that I live in a flat - “Please select your address from the available options.” Yup, used this before, how the credit reference people deal with the fact that everyone expresses their flat number differently. Fine.

I live in a building with six flats. There’s only three on that list. None of them are mine. Oh dear.

Previous address: building with twelve flats, only one (!) listed. Wrong one. Pants.

Phone them up. “Sorry, sir, we use the same system as the website. Email [some address] and ask them to add your addresses to the database.” Email the address. Auto-responder: (words to the effect of) “This address does not accept direct emails. Please go to the website and put in your mobile number and a form will direct your query to the right department.” Don’t have a mobile number, since that is the problem. Can’t get to a contact form without one.

Phone back: “Oh, then call them - this is their number: [insert bazillion-squid-per-minute premium rate number here].”

Fifteen minutes on the bazillion-squid-per-minute premium rate number and I’m told they’ll get back to me. They get back to me: “Sorry, sir, that department’s closed for the evening. I’ll get on it tomorrow, although I don’t start work until two. They should be able to sort it for you.”

I await with trepidation. In the meantime, major kudos to Julian on the O2 online sales line who tried his best but was defeated by the evil that is the dumb terminal, and Liz on the O2 online customer care line, who was exceedingly helpful and diligent while presenting a friendly Northern-Irisher accent in the midst of it all. I just hope she gets it sorted for me, or I will cry. Like a baby. Who wants to spend less on his mobile bill, but may be prevented by a *!@@)} computer!

As an aside: a few months back I had to spend an extended evening on to the Carphone Warehouse O2 people, trying to sort out a number port for my wife’s phone. I talked to a couple of real dough-bags on there, but there was one operator (whose name I unfortunately cannot recall) who was very helpful despite being new to the job. There are some cracking good customer service types out there, in a job typically known for sullen unhelpfulness. It’s nice to know.