Douglas Coupland's new book “JPod” would have dropped through my letter box yesterday were it not for the fact it's too large to fit, so the postie just left it outside the door. I finished it this morning.

There's good and bad in that: on the one hand, it kept me interested. On the other, there's a fair amount of what could be termed “filler” in there. For example, the titular JPod are a group of game developers (when formed originally, all members had surnames beginning with the letter “J” ) working on a skateboarding game for an un-named firm in Vancouver. They pass the time inventing über-geek level competitions such as finding the one incorrect number in a printout of the first one hundred-thousand digits of π. This may indeed be the way time is spent in the larger game dev houses, but I wonder if there really needed to be 18 pages of the book filled with the aforementioned digits.

I may be missing something and Coupland's put a sekrit message in the π digits. Or in the 20 pages of random numbers that follow wherein a capital letter “O” has been substituted for one number “0”. Or the pages of prime numbers where one isn't prime. Or the list of three-letter words allowed in Scrabble™ with one that isn't. Or in the typographic art and sinographs between chapters (including the full text of a 419 scam letter, the first few lines of a camera function in C++ or a page, blank apart from the words “I'm so fucking sick of Google” in small type in the middle).

But enough of that, is the story any good? It centres around the narrator, one Ethan Jarlewski, his co-workers in JPod and his family. When we first meet Ethan and the crew, they're coming back from a meeting where Steve, the new head of marketing, has informed them they'll be including a talking turtle in their skateboarding game. This move, largely based on Steve's desire to connect with his son after a divorce, will come to naught when he disappears. Ethan suspects his mother had something to do with Steve's disappearence - and this is not out of the realms of possibility as, immediately after the turtle meeting, he had to dash off to help his mother dispose of the corpse of a biker she'd electrocuted when he was threatening her over her crop of pot she grows in the basement.

With Steve gone though, things turn from bad to worse as the new head of marketing re-purposes the game into a fantasy RPG called SpriteQuest. The team rebels by hiding the code for a Ronald McDonald-based rampage game in it, but things come to a head when one the execs tells Ethan the game will be cancelled anyway if Ethan can't persuade his real estate-selling brother to sell a particular apartment (and, coincidently, one where the biker happens to be buried) to the exec. Then things get strange.

So, yeah. It's interesting, arty and a good read.