The Coincidence Authority
November 2013
J.W. Ironmonger / Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Since finding herself abandoned in a Devon fairground at the age of three, Azalia Lewis’s life has been “a mess of contradictions, and coincidences and peculiarities”. Her mother mysteriously disappears, and with authorities unable to trace her father, she is fostered out to teachers Luke and Rebecca Folley, who subsequently move to Uganda to run a mission school, taking Azalea with them.
However, there are further postscripts to Azalea’s story, and it is only as seemingly insignificant events are revisited and pieced together that an eerie pattern emerges, and Azalea is convinced that her life was destined for misfortune. That is, until she meets Thomas Post, a self-proclaimed authority on coincidences who, reducing the likelihood of events to their mathematical probability, attempts to convince her that she has simply been “seduced by a cruel consternation of events that has no meaning”.
As the two fall in love and battle it out in an attempt to solve the riddle of her life, Post’s unwavering rationalism also begins to falter, and we are left questioning our own beliefs in free will and determinism. However, as events become increasingly implausible, and the question of coincidence draws out, a potentially clever premise is undermined by its own seeming lack of coincidence, and the visibility of Ironmonger’s own hand in orchestrating it.
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