FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| BOOKS Disco 2000 Eight miles high on the the way home from Newfoundland I face a choice: Either watch Tarantino's Jackie Brown for a second time this flight, despite having handed back my earphones; or read the stories in Disco 2000. The movie won. On the face of it, Disco 2000 looks promising enough. The idea is simple: get a dozen or so of the best and brightest young writers of today to explore the attitudes and obsessions of the pre-millennial generation by writing a story of the dying hours of 31 December 1999. So what went wrong? First up, a good number of the stories in fact have very little to do with the encroaching millennial celebrations, per se, but instead cover ground that has been more fruitfully tilled by other writers for a long time now - drug-taking as a mode of life rather than a culture, the fading line between TV World and the Real World, the rave scene, and a declining sense of identity in the (post) modern world. None of this is very new. Second, the book's premise is shallower than it first appears. After all, the year 2000 is so close now that it offers the writers little space to speculate on what those last hours of 1999 will look like. Anyone with half a brain already knows exactly what to expect and - as these stories, to their credit, do underline - it won't be pretty. Having said that, taken as a whole the tales in Disco 2000 do offer a couple of common themes that their authors might - given time and inclination - have explored in more depth. For example, the idea of escape, or the need to escape, prevails throughout these stories. Characters here typically opt for refuge in the chemical world or by flight to "foreign," more exotic locations, rather than tackle or overthrow the tired conventions of society. How these urges relate to the millennium - as opposed to, say, the impact of post-colonialism - is worth considering. Another related theme is that of weariness. Not just tiredness, but sheer bloody exhaustion. Especially in the case of the British writers here, you get a sense that society is winding down, grinding to a halt as the century drags its sorry butt out the door. Unfortunately, it is a weariness that all too often infects the writers themselves, who become mired in the obsessions and minute concerns of their characters instead of transcending the condition they describe. Speaking of weariness, I should add that Jackie Brown ended long before we hit the ground in Calgary, leaving me more time to kill. Thank you, steward, I think I will take that pillow now.... |