Counting the human cost of columbine

Hey nostradamus!

by douglas coupland(flamingo, (pounds) 15.99) FOR this, his third novel of the new decade, Canadian author Douglas Coupland has taken as his template one of the defining moments of the last: the Columbine High School massacre of April, 1999. He has also returned to some of the subject matter of last year's short story collection, Life After God.

Coupland never actually mentions Columbine and the details of the massacre at his fictional North Vancouver school could easily be a composite of several similar events. He pushes it further back in time as well, to 1988. But any 21st-century reader seeing the words "high school massacre" can have only one response: Columbine.

But where the Columbine post-mortem concentrated on the motives of the killers and the reasons for their spree, Coupland takes as his subject the human cost. What happens to the people who survive, and their families? And, importantly for a novel which seeks to tackle religion head-on, where have the dead gone?

There are four chapters, each voiced by a different character. The first is Cheryl Anyway, who died in the massacre and who narrates her section from "the calm dark" where she is "waiting to go off to the Next Place."

She tells the story of what actually happened - disaffected youths in duck shooting outfits, automatic weapons, the usual stuff - and muses on God and religion. Her commentary is interrupted by the prayers of those she has left behind and their questions hang like accusing tabloid headlines. "Why us then?

Cheryl has become a media celebrity in death because, when her bloodstained folder was found in the carnage of the school cafeteria, it had written on it the words 'God is nowhere. God is now here'. She'd scrawled the phrase unthinkingly just before the shootings but afterwards they were taken as a profound statement by the members of Youth Alive!, a creepy evangelical religious group she hung out with.

In fact, Cheryl had only joined Youth Alive! to snare Jason Klaasen, whose story makes up the second chapter. It's 1999 now, 11 years on, and Jason exists on a diet of drink and drugs and the dumb affection of his dog, Joyce. Although it was Jason who helped stop the massacre, although it was in his arms that Cheryl died, the media witch hunt pegged him as an accomplice. He was eventually cleared, but some mud always sticks. In some bar, somewhere, someone will click eventually. "Hey, you're that guy " Jason's is the closest voice to the author's own and it's through him that we get the trademark Couplandisms: the arch put-downs, the acid asides. A bank manager, for instance, is described as having "the pursed hardness of someone who spends her days delivering bad news to people and knows she'll be doing it until her hips shatter".

And we start seeing echoes of earlier works, particularly in Jason's close relationship with his mother which echoes the mother- son relationship in the previous novel, All Families Are Psychotic.

After Jason, Coupland ploughs on, through to Heather in 2002 - Jason has finally found a girlfriend - and finally to Reg, Jason's religious nutcase of a father. The novel ends with Reg, now a reformed character, printing up copies of his short entry - a letter to Jason - and heading for the forest to pin them to trees where he feels certain Jason will miraculously melt out of the woods like some latter-day sprite.

Finally, the message of this novel seems to be that there is always hope, even in the teeth of life's randomness. It's a leap sideways from the acid irony which has shaded some of Coupland's earlier novels. Instead, from the pen of one of the coolest authors on the planet has come a work of suffusing humanity.

Douglas Coupland is at the EIBF on August 24 (7pm)

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