BOOK OF THE DAY: Generation ABy Douglas Coupland William Heinemann 297pp, £16.99
EVERY SO often a novel comes along that genuinely captures the Zeitgeist.
Such a book was Douglas Coupland's 1991 debut Generation X,an attempt to show the baby boomers that "people born after 1960" had a culture of their own and plenty to say about it. Coupland's novel was the story of overeducated, underemployed 20-somethings with a love of pop culture and a knack for coining neologisms (some of which, like McJob, subsequently entered mainstream usage). It was embraced by the generation that inspired it.
His new novel Generation A, however, is unlikely to be embraced by anyone. The story begins promisingly in a not-so- distant future in which bees have become extinct, wildflowers are a thing of the past and hand- pollinated fruit has become an expensive luxury. Crops have failed and food prices are rising.
Many are turning to a new prescription drug called Solon, which makes users feel that time is passing more quickly and removes anxiety about the future.
This convincingly depicted world is not quite a dystopia – things are not unbearably dreadful for most westerners – but one suspects they might get a whole lot worse fairly soon.
And then, five ordinary people are stung by bees. There’s Harj, a Sri Lankan call-centre worker; Zack, a slacker-cum-farmer from the American midwest; Diana, a Canadian dental hygienist with Tourettes syndrome; Samantha, a fitness trainer from New Zealand, and Julien, a preposterous French stereotype.
Conveniently, the first four are English speakers, the latter four are white and all are articulate, self-aware and well-educated, so Coupland doesn’t have to step outside his comfort zone.
The story of each sting immediately hits the internet and our heroes find themselves taken away by mysterious scientists, isolated in featureless rooms and examined in an attempt to find out why they attracted what could be the last five bees on earth.
Once released from this strange captivity, our unfortunate bee- magnets eventually find each other and end up in a remote island off the Canadian coast. There, like the characters of Generation X, they tell each other stories.
Unfortunately, unlike, for example, Neil Gaiman's Worlds' End, these self-conscious fables never feel as though they are being told spontaneously. They feel as though they're being written by Douglas Coupland and seem to exist to highlight aspects of the characters' personalities.
And if you were wondering whether this group of people entertaining each other with stories while holed up against a hostile outside world is a conscious reference to Boccaccio's Decameron, well, you won't have to wonder for long.
Coupland points out this similarity himself, complete with a handy explanation of the original in case anyone doesn’t get the reference. In fact, he can’t help spelling everything out for the reader. It’s not enough to show that each of the five was interacting with the world in a particularly 21st century way just before they were stung – he has to have a character make this point.
Generation Aisn't a terrible book. It's always readable and sometimes funny, especially Harj's descriptions of clueless middle-class Americans, and some of the stories within the narrative are pretty entertaining.
Coupland used to have his finger firmly on the pulse, but these days it seems that the man who once defined a generation has lost the plot.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist.