‘It’s crazy, but it’s not quite crazy enough’ – The Coincidence Engine by Sam Leith

I’m not going to dither about here: if you like Thomas Pynchon, you”ll probably love Sam Leith’s debut, The Coincidence Engine. If you don’t – if you find Pynchon manic and irritating and excessively convoluted –  you’ll probably be less keen. And that’s what scuppered me. I was intrigued by the sound of this book – hell, there’s maths, a road-trip and murder packed in there; what more could a girl ask for? – but, for me, the reality of it never quite came together. Just like when I read Pynchon, I had the feeling here that the writer was caught up in the quirkiness and the weirdness and crazy complexity of his invented world, and not hugely invested in the characters themselves. And, in a way, as I’ll explain later, it’s almost not crazy enough.

Now, I know that all sounds harsh, and I want to be clear that I didn’t dislike the book, as such – elements of it really did grab me – I just felt that it was uneven, and the parts that did work didn’t entirely balance out those that didn’t. Pynchon fans – and Leith fans – please bring on the counterarguments. I think loads of people will love this book, but for now, you’re stuck with my curmudgeonly tuppence worth.

The plot’s hard to summarise. A missing, and possibly insane, mathematician is suspected to have invented a machine called a coincidence engine – a gadget that messes with reality so that probability gets skewed around it and peculiar things happen. A US agency, sort of tied to the government, is trying to track it down, as is a wealthy arms manufacturer, the heads of which reckon this engine could be used as a weapon. And everybody thinks Alex Smart, a nerdy Cambridge postgraduate student, has gotten his hands on the engine and is transporting it to a mysterious contact somewhere on the west coast of America, when, actually, all Alex wants to do is propose to his girlfriend. On his trail are two agents from the government organisation, one a former drunk, the other a guy who literally lacks an imagination, and two former soldiers working on behalf of the weaponry people. And as they all race across the desert, the coincidences around them multiply… We’ve got conspiracy theories, secretive agencies working at cross-purposes, a hapless innocent, a madmen (actually, several madmen), a crazy scientific hypothesis that might just herald the end of the world and a (sort of) magic ring. It’s pretty exhilarating, despite my misgivings. Leith is ambitious and (unlike his apsychotic character, Jones) very imaginative. And as multi-stranded as it all is, he does tie it back up at the end, so don’t worry if you’re a bit confused as it goes along – you’ll eventually get explanations. On the other hand, the explanations themselves felt a little too pat, almost tacked on as though the writer was afraid the reader would feel stiffed by their absence. Still, that’s a pretty minor complaint. The different strands – the conspiracies and theories and quests – are cleverly interwoven, and given the oddity of the premise – the coincidence engine itself – none of it is too overwhelming or baffling.

Still, I wasn’t convinced – so why not? Aside from an irritation with clever-clever wacko conspiracy theories in fiction (which is partly why Pynchon annoys me), I didn’t think that Leith was equally committed to all the different threads that he uses to knit his expansive plot together. Jones, the guy who can’t imagine and can’t understand jokes, but has an eidetic memory and cries every night over his mother’s long-ago death, is brilliant. I’d read a whole book just about him. But the soldier-agents, Sherman and Davidoff, are just generic, disinterested thugs – there, simply, to fill the plot-hole of a competitive chase. Then there’s Bree, Jones’ partner on the job; she has a fairly standard back-story (alcoholism, broken marriage, estranged child) but her parts of the narrative have more emotional depth than many of the others, and I found (with some relief) that I cared about what happened to her and what she thought about her situation. In contrast, Alex’s mission to get to his girlfriend and propose marriage isn’t especially convincing, possibly because we’ve very little sense of what their relationship is actually like and so don’t have much of an opinion about whether he’s optimistic or idiotic. Then there’s the fact that most of the plot of the novel hangs around the chase to reach Alex and find the coincidence engine, but aside from Jones and Bree being more likeable than Sherman and Davidoff, there’s no real incentive to root for one team over the other, or, indeed, to hope that Alex gets away scot-free, because there’s not any clear scenario set out for what would happen if either agency got hold of the engine or failed to do so. So I found myself interested in what happened as it happened, but I wasn’t turning the pages in anticipation of some desired outcome – and with a thriller/hunt scenario, that’s a big problem. And then there’s the coincidence engine itself. It’s a neat idea, and the potentially horrific and apocalyptic situations that Leith suggests it could herald, especially a singularity that could “pull our universe inside out through its own asshole”, are fantastic – but aside from a couple of funny and gruesome occurrences (involving silver Pontiacs and snooker equipment, respectively), it doesn’t really live up to the promise. Like I suggested earlier, it’s crazy, but it’s not quite crazy enough. Leith deals with this at the end of the novel, fine, but before that, it felt like something was missing – some huge, all-singing, all-dancing centre that would override a few wooden characters and overly-explanatory dialogue. So by the time everything gets explained at the last minute, it’s too late – the novel already seems to hover about a vacuum where something glittering should rest.

Any Cop?: Maybe I’m missing the point. I know plenty of you will love this. But I thought it missed the mark – it’s not deep or developed enough as regards several of the characters, and there’s not enough riding on the plot, so it’s missing some crucial tension. But it’s interesting, all the same. It’ll divide readers, much like Pynchon does, and though it’s not working at the same razor-sharp pitch as Pynchon’s more demented novels, it’ll appeal to the same audience, and I think, for those readers, Leith’s one to watch.

Valerie O’Riordan