Coincidence Matters (ePub)

The nine stories included are disparate, yet linked by repeating patterns from unchanging moulds of alienation, sexual attraction, and a yearning for the singular. Selection from the obstinate recurrence of chance is based on inconceivability elaborated by fantasy. First story ‘Apocalypse’, suggests the digital age can realize George Berkeley’s ideas to evade the doom warned by Berthold Brecht, ordaining a world without matter. In ‘Private View’ the protagonist is suspended as principal exhibit for an art gallery. ‘Glaring Lights’ uses a remorseless political reality to shatter the haven for an idyllic love-match. The fourth concerns an unexpected encounter in a hotel proposed by an aristocrat. In another, a long train journey as child becomes unbearable, yet unexpectedly rewarding. In a further tale the narrator is seated beside the woman, who twenty years earlier had shown him the unknown side of Florence. Next is an elegy for a place that was lovely, but no more. Closing, is an interrogation that goes wrong, but through ‘quits’, ends with recovery of a lost home. Which parts are real, and what imagined is left untold. Though not satisfactorily explained by science, whether unambiguous by logic, or the reverse, advent of coincidences, transforms the ordinariness of reality. Too complex to be invented, their intricate emergence can only be authentic.