Hey Nostradamus!

infobox Book |
name = Hey Nostradamus!


image_caption = Paperback edition cover
author = Douglas Coupland
country = Canada
language = English
genre = Novel
publisher = Bloomsbury USA
release_date = July 2, 2004
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages = 244 pp
isbn = ISBN 1582344159
preceded_by = All Families Are Psychotic
followed_by = Eleanor Rigby (novel)

"Hey Nostradamus!" is a novel by Douglas Coupland centred around a fictional 1988 school shooting in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia and its aftermath. This is Coupland's most critically acclaimed novel. It was first published by Random House of Canada in 2003.The novel comprises four first-person narratives, each from the perspective of a character directly or indirectly effected by the shooting. The novel intertwines substantial themes, including adolescent love, sex, religion, prayer and grief.

Plot Synopsis

The novel follows the stories of victims of a fictional school shooting in North Vancouver in 1988. Coupland has expressed his concern that the killers of the Columbine received more focus than the victims; this is his story about the victims of tragedy. [Didcock, Barry. “Prophet & Loss”. ‘’The Sunday Herald’’, Sept. 14, 2003] The novel is told in four parts, each with a different narrator and focus.

1988: Cheryl

This part of the book is told post-mortem by Cheryl, a girl killed in the fictional school shooting at Delbrook Senior Secondary. Cheryl, from a purgatorial ante-state, recounts the events that lead up to the shooting, involving her secret trip to Las Vegas to marry her boyfriend Jason. She also describes with a first person perspective what was happening in the cafeteria while the school shooting was taking place.

Cheryl describes her relationship to God, her relationship to her group of religious minded friends and their "Youth Alive!" group, and her relationship to her husband, Jason. She speaks about her life with a frank, open nature, not afraid of anything, as she is beyond the grave.

We also listen in to the prayers of people still in the incident and of those thinking about the incident. It is explained that only prayers and swearing can carry through to the afterlife. The text indents the prayers in the section, presenting them without interaction with Cheryl's character, as stand-alone external perceptions of the incident.

During the shooting, Cheryl was trapped under a table at the center of the cafeteria. While the killers were moving their way through the crowd, one of them decides that he has had enough with the killing, and wants to stop. The other killers decide that he has become weak, and kill him. They then turn their attention to Cheryl and her friends, and Cheryl becomes the final casualty.

1999: Jason

This section is a letter from Jason to his two nephews. We learn about what happened to Jason during and after the shooting at Delbrook. During the killing, Jason sees the killers running rampant, and finds a river-rock in a planter and after the one killer's turn of conscience, Jason throws the rock, killing one of the shooters. However, he is too late to save Cheryl, who dies in his arms.

Discovered thus by the police, Jason is initially treated as a suspect: an additional level of tragedy for Jason, further intensified by the mainstream media's sensationalistic exploitation of this mistake. As a result of this irresponsible treatment of the events by corporate media, the families in the school, including Cheryl's parents, believe Jason guilty and variously shun and abuse him.

The media then further misrepresent Jason by reporting, without research, that Jason had been seen before the shooting roughing up an accusatory Youth Alive! member over alleged impropriety in his relationship with Cheryl, whom Jason had in fact privately married in a Las Vegas chapel.

When Jason arrives home from the shooting incident, the RCMP talk to Jason’s parents. They tell them that Jason is a hero for taking out one of the killers. His father, however, does not see this. Reg has an excessively legalistic Christianity, and he reacts to the news that his son has taken a life with a extreme literalism and a confusingly condescending reaction. Jason’s mother, in this moment, breaks down, and attacks and seriously wounds her husband Reg. In this moment, Jason’s parent’s relationship undergoes a rupture that will never be healed.

In the letter, forming this section of the book, Jason's details the enduring and corrosive effects on his state of mind caused by his frenzied mistreatment by the media, and his dogged attempts to restore himself. He further details the pain caused by his father's openly preferential treatment of elder brother Kent, a leader in the Youth Alive! movement: pain intensified by Kent's early death and the attendant loss of opportunity for reconciliation.

Jason’s story continues from this beginning, as he tries to come to terms with the facts that life has presented him. He enters into a dark world very different from where he expects to see himself. He experiences serial moments of black-out near the end of his letter, becoming disoriented and lost. However, Jason is presented with another chance to kill, again in self-defense, but he restrains himself. This choice of life over death provides him with a kind of redemption.

The secondary plot movement of the part involves the death of Kent. His funeral is a scene of a large fight between Kent’s widow, Barb, and Reg. The fight is based over whether or not twins both have souls. Reg says that one twin would be without a soul, which to Barb, the mother of twins, is appalling. This sends Reg into another dark spiral. Reg ends up at one point in the hospital, and only Jason goes to visit him there.

2002: Heather

This part of the novel is narrated by Heather, a woman with whom Jason has eventually been able to achieve trust and intimacy. Jason has now gone missing, and Heather is keeping a journal to remember and deal with her loss of him.

In a vain search for Jason, Heather is befriended by a con-artist named Allison who fraudulently presents herself to Heather as a psychic in order to extort money in exchange for (false) news of Jason. Allison provides Heather with information that only Jason would have. Jason and Heather’s relationship began in a Toys’R’Us, with Jason purchasing toys for his nephews. Jason and Heather begin to create their own characters and stories for their characters, which is the information provided by Allison back to Heather.

Heather also talks about her relationship to Reg, who is undergoing fundamental changes due to the loss of both of his children. Heather’s interactions with Reg bring Reg back to a more humane Christianity, while bringing Heather to consider faith, where she had hitherto been staunchly against it.

2003: Reg

Jason is still missing, and this part is narrated by Reg as a lament for his lost son. This section is told by Reg as an atonement for his previous actions as he has come to realize the faults in his particular belief system.

He is writing a letter to Jason which he is going to post on the trees around the forest, hoping his son reads the letter, realises that his father has undergone a transformation, and comes home to him. The section, which climactically ends the book, is a paean of exultation.

Characters

; Cheryl: Cheryl is the first narrator of the story. She is a young girl, in grade 12, who was murdered in the fictional school shooting at Delbrook Senior Secondary. She was separate from her family, as she was the only one to find religion. She was the last fatality caused by the killers before they were themselves killed. She narrates her section from a place between worlds, where only prayer and swear can reach. Jason and Cheryl are married in Las Vegas shortly before the incident at Delbrook.

; Jason: A quiet and reflective child from a very religious family, Jason is the narrator of the second section of the novel. His father, Reg, is an intensely judgemental ultra-protestant, who favoured his older brother Kent.

; Reg: Reg is the narrator of the fourth part of the novel. Born to a strict father, Reg turned to belief as his salvation. Creating a very strict religious code for himself, Reg married and became the father to two children, Kent and Jason. Kent was his father’s child, following in his father’s religious footsteps. Throughout the novel, Reg undergoes a transformation from narrow fundamentalist to a more open and loving human being.

; Jason’s mother: Jason’s mother married Reg when she thought she had found someone who believed in something . After Reg outcasts Jason, Jason’s mother leaves Reg, and takes Jason across Canada. She eventually succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease.

; Kent: Jason’s older brother. He is a leader in the Youth Alive! movement, and looms over his brother as his father’s chosen son. Kent is married to Barb, and has two twin sons with her. He dies in the beginning of the second part from a car accident.

; Barb: Kent’s wife, she is the mother of Kent’s twin sons, Jason’s nephews. After a fallout with Reg, she remains close to Jason until his disappearance. She is a different person from Kent in many ways, and is very different after the death of Kent.

; Heather: Jason’s romantic partner in the latter half of the novel, Heather is the narrator of the third part of the novel. She is a woman who feels distant and is brought back into the world, just as she brings out Jason from his emotional seclusion. She creates characters and stories with Jason, which are later provided back to her by a psychic, who Heather believes will bring her back to the missing Jason.

Inspiration

Coupland began to write the novel in December, 2001, after a “nightmarish 40-city tour that began on 10 September”. [Anthony, Andrew. “Close to the Edge”. ‘’The Observer’’, August 24, 2003.] This tour took him across the United States and allowed him to experience the “collective sorrow” of the United States. [Anthony, Andrew. “Close to the Edge”. ‘’The Observer’’, August 24, 2003.] Coupland began to research the Columbine events after this experience.

The quotation from Corinthians that opens the novel was found on a gravestone of one of the children who died in a high school shooting. [Didcock, Barry. “Prophet & Loss”. ‘’The Sunday Herald’’, September 14, 2003.]

History of the Novel

An international best selling novel, the novel was received well by critics.

quote|"One lesson I've learned is that you can never guess how a work will be received, … Curiously, The Rocky Mountain News, which is the daily that did the most intense documentation of the incident, and which is the one paper I might have been a bit tetchy about, gave the book an A-minus and told its readers that the memory of Columbine was respected, and in no way diminished or exploited.

"My personal litmus test was that I didn't want any family member of a Columbine shooting to feel that their loss was being exploited.”|Coupland in The Globe and Mail [Toller, Carol. “The massacre motif”. ‘’The Globe and Mail’’, July 31, 2003.]

The novel was released the same week as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant was released, which also dealt with a Columbine like situation.

Coupland also had an art installation on the same topic, called “Tropical birds” which featured 3D versions of the kneeling figure from the front cover of Hey Nostradamus, and other scenes which features scenes from a school shooting like tragedy. [ Gill, Alexandra. “Art goes Underground”. ‘’The Globe and Mail’’, October 27, 2003.]

External links

* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1040923,00.html Book review] from "The Guardian"

References

ee also

*Columbine High School massacre