The Coincidence Engine – Sam Leith

The Coincidence Engine - Sam Leith

I seem to continuously be drawn to books about people similar to myself. Escapism in books is wonderful, and I love fantasy novels about epic warlords as much as the next guy, but understanding what’s going on in a characters head, and seeing their decisions being made inside your own is a great feeling. Of course, this is the intention of almost all writers. If you’re similar to the character or not, the author wants you to be inside their head, understanding their decisions. A truly great author can give you this feeling of personal connection with any protagonist, but a starting similarity certainly helps.

So, take The Coincidence Engine, a novel about a mathematician at university, whose life is turned upside-down when he starts being tracked on his spur-of-the-moment trip to the States by two large and slightly sinister interests. (Admittedly, this part is less true of my life, but a book entirely about me probably wouldn’t be as interesting). Alex, our protagonist, makes an impulse decision in an antique shop standing in front of a ring. He’s going to buy that ring, and a plane ticket to the States, and propose to his girlfriend.
Odd things have been happening however. A plane has fallen out of the sky, which would be annoying enough except that there’s no record of this plane ever existing, and it seems to have been piloted by a male stripper with no piloting experience past the costume he’s wearing. The Directorate of the Extremely Improbable (an organisation almost as farcical as its name) is worried that someone has finally built the coincidence engine that the fanatical mathematician Barchanski was raving about before he disappeared. They’ve tracked its effect and they believe it’s in the case Alex is couriering to the US to gain a cheap flight.

If this seems slightly confusing and far fetched, you’d be right. A coincidence engine seems like a really interesting and useful plot device. Why have these two characters met up at random despite having no idea the other was here? Must have been the coincidence engine. But it’s got it’s problems. Firstly you can only do this so many times before it starts to feel a little lazy, and also, the concept as a whole is very confusing. It is discussed in the book that, as coincidences aren’t a tangible thing, the coincidence engine must actually have some other, powerful effect that causes these things to happen, but other than this small concept, the workings are left unexplained. To me this just seemed like careless storytelling. Why is the central concept, that gives the book its name, so poorly explained and realised?

The writing style of the book is rather odd as well. The book is written as a third person omniscient narrative, a style not normally though of as one with a relatable narrator. However, twice in the book, the narrator breaks off from the story and directly addresses the reader, giving his ‘opinion’ on the story and characters. These interludes didn’t seem to add anything to the novel at all, mostly reminding me that I was reading a made up story and pulling me out of the action. I was, at one point, happily sympathising with Alex, after he’d made a particularly stupid mistake and was feeling rather chagrined when the narrator chimed in and told me how stupid Alex was, and how he should buck up his ideas. Possibly this is the view of other people reading the book, and I’m just too sympathetic, but the assumption of how readers will feel towards a character is a foolish one to make.

I did rather enjoy parts of the story. The sections of the book focusing on Bree, an operative for the DEI who is sent to track Alex, are well thought out and well told, and her backstory is well considered as well. It seems tangential to the plot though. It becomes linked in at the end but as it’s being told, it seems like a pleasant if irrelevant pause in the actual plot of the book.
Alex is being tracked across the US by two groups, one from the DEI, and one from a rival corporation. The differences between their approaches and successes is rather interesting, however, as the story swaps between the three sets of characters, none of them quite seem to get enough exposure to be truly fleshed out and relatable. If this were an expense taken so that a fascinating and tightly woven plot could be threaded through the book, it would probably be acceptable, but most of it seems to be taken up by people driving around, doing very little, and as I said above, quite a lot of the more important or exciting moments are explained away by just saying that “the coincidence engine did it”, which feels rather weak.

While I can see the ambition in the story he was trying to write, I don’t think that Sam Leith has quite managed it. The book is quite readable, but I found that the plot was too muddled and the characters mainly too insubstantial to make it a particularly great novel.

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BuddyMarks BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea del.icio.us

Digg diigo DotNetKicks DropJack dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com Furl Google

Hugg Jamespot Jeqq Kaboodle kirtsy linkaGoGo LinkedIn LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace MyWeb

Netvouz Newsvine oneview OnlyWire PlugIM Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy Slashdot Sphere

Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Twitter Webride Windows Live Worlds Movies Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

 If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »