Douglas Coupland launches CBC Massey Lectures tour in Vancouver

Despite the ominous tone of his latest novel, bestselling Vancouver author Douglas Coupland maintains he is an optimist.

“Everyone thinks I’m a pessimist, except real pessimists,” Coupland quipped before an audience gathered at the Chan Centre for the Performing arts last night (October 12) to hear him deliver the first of five CBC Massey Lectures.

For those who have read Player One: What is to Become of Us—the five-part novel that is the basis for the lecture series—some uncertainty about Coupland’s outlook on humankind’s future might be justified.

The narrative, set against the backdrop of a sudden global catastrophe, is built upon the voices of four adult characters—along with that of an enigmatic presence known as Player One—who find themselves stranded in a Toronto airport cocktail lounge.

They include Karen, a divorcee hoping to hook up with a date she met online; Rick, a down-and-out bartender who is seeking answers from a popular self-help guru; Luke, a disillusioned pastor who is on the run after raiding his church’s bank account; and Rachel, an attractive “Hitchcock blond” who is cursed with a bizarre, robot-like personality.

The book’s publisher, House of Anansi Press, describes the work as an exploration of “the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, and the afterlife”. It has been long-listed for a Scotiabank Giller Prize.

“Let’s not ask happy, perky questions,” Coupland said, when asked during a question-and-answer session by CBC host Paul Kennedy about the issues raised in Player One.

Kennedy also asked Coupland about his decision to use fiction, a departure from the decades-long Massey lecture tradition.

Coupland said he grappled with how to distill ideas he has developed over many years into a series of lectures.

“It really forced me to look at what I was doing, saying, and thinking for two decades,” the author said.

“How can you crystallize this into something as small as five hours, and is that possible? And so, what is fiction but an engine to pull you through ideas without you even hopefully knowing that you’re being pulled through them. And so that’s why I chose fiction in the end.”

Asked by an audience member about his use of multiple viewpoints in his fiction, Coupland cited the emergence of the split-screen technique in film.

“There’s so many ways of looking at any event,” Coupland said. “There’s multiple viewpoints, and, obviously, as we sort of started to learn tonight with the story, what you see as one person’s reality is usually radically different than someone else’s. And it’s always sort of curious to see what those [points of view] are.”

Coupland is scheduled to deliver the remaining lectures in Regina, Charlottetown, Ottawa, and Toronto. The lecture series is set to be broadcast on CBC Radio One from November 8 to 12.