17 Sep 2013 04:53:05
Those are pretty short odds. If you want long odds, try writing a novel that abounds in probabilities without critics cracking some kind of joke about how likely you are to get away with it. It isn't simply that Thomas Post, a lecturer in applied philosophy at the University of London, is frequently shown working through similar statistical puzzles and reducing synchronicity to a series of mathematical certainties; it's that the plot hinges on chance – or the lack of it.
Post's abstract thought experiments take on solid form when he meets Azalea Lewis, a woman who seems to be at the mercy of coincidence and fate. Members of her family keep getting killed on the same date, at 10-year intervals. The two men she has met out of the three who might be her biological father are both blind. And so it goes on. She even gets to know Post by an apparent coincidence: they are first brought together when dozens of travellers at Euston station find themselves sprawled at the bottom of an escalator in a human pile-up. They later find out that they work at the same university when Lewis pops into Post's office to ask about the possibility of her dying on the 10th anniversary of the last significant death in her family. Post (and, yes, chances are you've seen this coming) then becomes involved in a fight against this fate – and so against the kind of odds that he's spent his career delineating.
It's a premise that draws an unwelcome amount of attention to the mechanics of plot formation. Novels, after all, rely not so much on coincidence as the writer's ability to hide the fact that anything only ever happens according to his or her whim. Too often, I found myself thinking that this wasn't so much a battle against providence as against whatever Ironmonger decided on next.
Ironmonger often becomes entangled in the complexity of his ideas, in particular, the need to move forwards and backwards in time so often, which leaves him tripping over his tenses: "It was an event of such callous barbarity that Luke and Rebecca would shield her from the news of it, even as she became slowly aware of the episode that was to determine her future in ways that no one could foresee. It was an event that may have been coldly unfolding, even as the Folleys hugged their newfound daughter and smothered her with newfound affection."
Also, "coldly"? Can temperature apply to the unravelling of events?
Such lapses are especially disappointing, because Ironmonger can write well. Anyone who has read his superb debut, The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder, will be aware of his talent – and there's plenty on display in The Coincidence Authority. Azalea and Thomas's circumstances aren't always entirely credible, but there is real warmth in their relationship, and an enjoyably frothy humour to their dialogue. And while it's possible to complain about odd passages of Ironmonger's writing, plenty more hit their target.
Much of the action takes place in Uganda in the 1980s and 90s, and the author is particularly good at describing the country's beauty, as well as its horrors. It perhaps feels a little too inevitable that the infamous Joseph Kony and his army of child soldiers should play a big part in the plot, but Ironmonger's rage and sadness still made me catch my breath. There are passages memorable both for the telling detail and the sharp overview. A "boy" shoots a woman and we are told: "He wore a bandana on his head like a South American freedom fighter, and a faded T-shirt with Dennis the Menace and Gnasher on the front." A massacre is carried out and Ironmonger reminds us: "As we wept for a dead princess in London, as we hunted for weapons in Iraq, as we queued for our touchscreen mobile phones, children were lining up to have their hands hacked off."
So there are still plenty of reasons to read this book; even if Ironmonger isn't quite equal to his audacious premise, and even if he commits the cardinal sin of ending it with a self-penned poem, he can write. Now that the difficult second novel is out of the way, he'll be able to write something better. With a little luck.
