The story starts simply enough: five individuals trapped for five hours in an airport hotel lounge, which coincidently corresponds to five chapters, which each neatly correspond to an hour in real time.
But no sooner does Douglas Coupland set up Player One’s orderly world than he relinquishes that simple world to chaos.
It comes in the form of a news ticker on the lounge’s television – and things go downhill at the speed of cable news: a bomb is detonated at the OPEC summit, crude oil skyrockets, a mushroom cloud, an unknown assailant…
Just a few hours ago, everything was so normal (a word on which Player One declares all out war). The single mom was waiting for her Internet hook-up, the bartender was looking forward to shaking the hand of a self-help guru, the renegade pastor was wondering how long it would take his flock to find the church fund missing, and the autistic knock-out blonde was Googling mice breeding.
All the while, the reader is visited by the voice of Player One. Player One is not bound by human limitations of time or space. He (or she?) jumps between tenses and perspectives, fast-forwards the story at will, and considers the drama unfolding in the airport hotel lounge with both uncommon insight and strange detachment, leading the reader to the inextricable conclusion that whoever or whatever It is knows the end of the story.
“Much of what normal people think of as art is simply the establishment of repetitive structures that become interesting when they are broken in some way,” one of the characters realizes.
Player One is a textbook example of how writers deal with big events by focusing on the little lives of the people caught inside (i.e. almost any war movie). The book quickly leaps from the limited worlds of its characters to an omnipresent narrative about the underpinnings of the universe, the purpose of life and the nature of time.
Player One is about what it really means to be human – no small task. What sets Player One apart from other stories with such lofty goals (2001: A Space Odyssey, Tree of Life) is that Coupland manages to bring it all back together into a neatly packaged Hollywood ending where the bad guys get what they deserve and the good guys live happily ever after (relatively speaking for an oil-depleted dystopia). That he does so may be anathema to some critics. It may also be Coupland’s own way of critiquing a race of beings who are conditioned, programed, destined or doomed to wrap their humanity, their very existence, around a story.
