Player one

Player One is the first Massey's lecture to be delivered as a work of fiction by the best-selling author Douglas Coupland. Instead of the traditional series of five lectures, Coupland has produced a novel about four characters in crisis, each hoping to be in a better place in life. All of the characters had come together in the Toronto Airport Hotel Lounge to discuss their views on time, story and faith, while the world outside descends into chaos.

Play One introduced us to the end of an era, our era, when oil prices goes up to almost a thousand dollars per barrel, cells phones stops working , and chemicals explosions are happening everywhere. The book is divided into 5 chapters, and each chapter is divided into 5 parts, each describing the events from the perspective of one of the 5 main characters: Karen, Luke, Rick, Rachel, and Player One. As the plot follows, each character tells the story of how they ended up at the hotel lounge on this particular day. Karen, a receptionist at a physiatrist's office, has flown in to meet Warren whom she had met on an internet chat room; Luke, a formal pastor who has recently lost his faith in the Holy One, just stole twenty grand from his church's renovation fund; Rachel, an incredibly beautiful woman diagnosed with autism , is at the bar in search for a man who will father her a child; Rick, the bartender at the lounge, is in desperate search for a better life in which he believed Leslie Freemont's " Dynamics Seminar System" can help him achieve.

Player One addresses many of the controversial issues we face in the twenty first century.. It is clear that Coupland had little intention for the readers to focus on the disasters as compared to his troubled characters' response to the extremities. Even though, the narrative cycles through each character's perspective, there remains a consistent " Coupland-esque coolness" (www.guardian.co.uk) to the narrative voice, which makes it easier to be interested in the characters' predicaments rather than feeling sympathy towards the characters as people. The question of seeing ones life as a story or picture, afterlife and faith is thoroughly examined as each character tells their story. Life, as Coupland suggested, is more of sequenced events than a picture, even though, most of us would like to see our lives through a big frame in which everything just come together as whole. What's more mysterious compared to life's itself would be what come after being alive. Faith lets us believe in Heaven or Hell, faith guides us to live by morals so that we may go to heaven after "life"; however, what happens when a person loses that faith. Coupland uses Luke as an example of a person who lost faith and no longer believes in after death. Through Luke, Coupland suggested that faith lets us confront death with serenity, however the loss of that faith will make us fear death