Oatley is by training a professor of cognitive psychology, and he self-consciously writes in the tradition of such literary medical men as Chekhov, Conan Doyle, and Somerset Maugham; as in a good case study, clinical clarity and precision are the hallmarks of his prose. The ideas of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Freud are deftly alluded to but never swamp the propulsive plot. The novel’s chief concern is the difficulty — perhaps the impossibility — of love and friendship surviving the barriers of nationalism and conflict. In describing the war years, Oatley tries to be exquisitely fair to the experiences of both the English and the Germans: we’re shown glimpses not just of the familiar scenes of the death camps and London in ruins, but also the burnt-out remains of the cities of Deutschland and the mistreatment of German civilians by the victors. It is suggested that Smith is haunted by fire-bombed German towns as much as by the horrors of concentration camps when “images of Bremen’s ruin alternated with images of the barbed wire and corpses of Belsen” run through his mind while he lies in bed.
Such parallels between the crimes of the Nazis and the military tactics of the Allies are a recurring subtext, and as such the novel is in keeping with the recent trend in both literature and history, notably inspired by W. G. Sebald, to focus on German suffering. Herein the novel falters. Although it is unquestionably a literary triumph, Oatley’s glib moral equivalence renders the book politically dubious. However much the Allied bombing of Germany might be criticized in retrospect, it was not in the same league of horrors as the Holocaust. The bombing had a military purpose, whereas the campaign of genocide against the Jews and Gypsies had no such rational endgame. The Holocaust was killing for the sake of killing, killing rooted in pure race hatred. Without the German surrender, this murder spree would only have ended with the extermination of every innocent the Nazis had their hands on.
Therefore Choose raises a large and pressing question: how can we communicate across personal, linguistic, psychological, and international barriers? But, unintentionally, it also illustrates the existence of another barrier, between literature and politics. Despite its strength as a work of fiction, this is no guide for understanding the dilemmas of twentieth-century history.
— Jeet Heer
Marshall McLuhan
by Douglas Coupland, Penguin Group (Canada) (2010)In the vast network of humankind, Marshall McLuhan and Douglas Coupland occupy a highly interconnected cluster, as patron saint and patron scribe, respectively, of Modern Multimedia Man. But where both are also often mistakenly cast as advocates for their respective technological eras, Coupland’s new biography of McLuhan for Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series makes clear that both writer and subject, guided as they are by humanistic concerns, are wary prophets at best.
To understand how misperceptions have arisen about the two men, consider just a few of the latter-day McLuhanisms that litter Coupland’s treatment: anagrams of key names and terms; a roster of online-generated pseudonyms for “Marshall McLuhan”; an Autism-Spectrum Quotient test; Internet map directions; YouTube comments; online bookseller listings and reviews; a dramatis personae of McLuhan’s University of Toronto colleagues (a “Muppet Kremlin,” Coupland calls them, delightfully); pseudo-anagrams reflecting the degeneration of McLuhan’s brain; and a series of interpretive meditations coupled with jumbled copies of same.
If McLuhan is indeed “the man who broke the shackles of linear communications,” as series editor John Ralston Saul puts it, Coupland might then be thought of as the man lashing readers with its flailing chains. But never mind that the technique of streaming hyper-modern bric-a-brac onto plain old paper has been stale since roughly 1991 — the approach is apt and knowing here, in a biography whose central themes are the omnipresent technological world and our individual inability to cope with it, and whose subject was often obscure to the point of incomprehensibility. (McLuhan’s philosophy, Coupland notes, could be “a glorious stew of diamonds and rhine-stones and Fabergé eggs and merde.”)
The best sections of the book are nevertheless those where Coupland, always a storyteller at heart, adopts the role of traditional biographer, simply inviting readers to gather around the fire and setting out with something akin to “Once upon a time...” So embarked, he traces his subject’s life and legacy, emphasizing a few key themes: Marshall’s desire to please his rhetoric-teaching, fame-courting mother; his poor social skills; his unique brain physiology; his adaptation of New Criticism techniques and literary arcana to the technological world; his intellectual ambition and magnetism; his Catholic religion; and his catholic writing style. These themes, however briefly explored, lend the sense of a complex human being singularly suited to spotting the patterns of his time.
Key to Coupland’s analysis is that McLuhan was determinedly not of the world Ralston Saul over-generously credits him with unleashing. He was, in Coupland’s excellent phrase, “the kid with an intellectual peanut allergy who alerts us to a tainted world.” McLuhan saw evidence everywhere that modern man had created a world modern men had not evolved to inhabit, and though he delighted in explaining that evidence, he personally resisted its implications. Coupland’s empathy for this aspect of McLuhan’s character fairly radiates off the page.
But then, sensitivity to the world has always been a hallmark of Coupland’s life and work as well. The two excerpts he somewhat shamelessly includes from his most recent novel, Generation A, speak to his McLuhanesque concern for the dehumanizing effects of evolutions in language and technology. This sense of common qualm ennobles the biography, self-promotion and all, and highlights the central irony uniting both men: if either McLuhan or Coupland really were interested in proselytizing for the post-literature age, surely neither would have chosen to do so in books. The medium, you will almost certainly have heard, is the message.
