Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 1998]
Douglas Coupland: Lara’s Book
Chris Mitchell
Well, it had to happen. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb
Raider videogames, gets the coffee table treatment
in her own glossy picture book. In an attempt to give
this tome some literary gravitas, Generation X author
Douglas Coupland has been drafted in to provides
thoughts about the Lara phenomenon and a story too.
Lara’s Book feels like a mish-mash of various marketing
ploys. There’s lots of new pictures of Lara herself to
appeal to fevered adolescents, strategic walkthroughs
of the various Tomb Raider games to help those who’ve
got stuck somewhere along the line, interviews with the
games’ developers about how Tomb Raider came into
being, all topped off with Coupland’s prose to maintain
Lara’s cool quotient with the lifestyle crowd.
It’s easy to see why Coupland agreed to be involved
with what is essentially another form of the Tomb
Raider franchise. Lara Croft is the perfect representation
of his love for pop culture and technology, with her
movie-star status as a cultural icon throwing up various
questions about the blurring of realities, both virtual
and normal.
Coupland’s disappointingly brief prose moves in the
same territory as his novels, taking something as inconsequential
as a videogame and expanding it into nothing
less than a metaphor for life. His skill as a writer has
always been in making such assertions seem strangely
appropriate rather than asinine, but here Coupland’s
meditations only serve to make the vacuity at the heart
of the Tomb Raider phenomenon even more apparent.
There’s a distinct sense that there’s actually precious
little to say about Lara. This is indicated by the fact
that far more space is given over to the game-solving
tips than to Coupland’s writing, despite his name being
flagged prominently on the front cover. Once you get
past the idea she’s a female character in a video game
that’s sold lots of copies, there’s not much left. Even
the game developers can offer up little else beyond the
observations that they wanted people to identify with
Lara and for her to be “almost a fantasy object”, which
is hardly the stuff of profundity.
Among the book’s hyperactive layout there is a
spread of various fan letters that have been sent to
Tomb Raider’s creators Eidos. It’s virtually impossible
to read what’s written in the letters, which is a pity, be-
BUY Douglas Coupland books online from and
181
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z