Beyond Coincidence

by Martin Plimmer and Brian King

Icon £12.99, pp292

Charles Coghlan, a leading actor in Victorian times, was born on Prince Edward Island, off eastern Canada. After a distinguished career, he died, following a brief illness, in Galveston, Texas, in 1899. Too far from Canada to be sent home, Coghlan was interred in a lead-lined coffin and placed in a local burial vault.

A year later, Galveston was struck by a hurricane that hurled massive waves over the cemetery and washed Coghlan's coffin out to sea. In stately solitude, the weatherbeaten box floated into the Gulf of Mexico, rounded Florida and sailed up the American coast until it reached Prince Edward Island. It was then picked up by local fishermen. He had made it home and was buried in the church of his baptism.

The tale is distinctly appealing. For a start, it is touching to know some of us still display a homing instinct even when we have snuffed it. In addition, the story has a decidedly spooky resonance: the dead adrift on the high seas, like Dracula's boat carried by the tides towards Whitby.

Most of all, the account of Coghlan's homecoming appeals because it satisfies our innate need to place order and pattern on the world. As Plimmer and King point out in this intriguing investigation of the cosmos's most improbable events: 'Coincidences make us seem less small and insignificant and the universe less terrifying and aimless.'

In other words, coincidences make us feel that we been selected by fate for special attention, though this can sometimes provide little comfort for those involved, such as the husband of Vera Czermak of Prague whose infidelity led her to jump from her third-floor balcony, only to land, by chance, on her errant spouse, killing him and saving her.

In general, though, coincidences give us a thrill and we remember and embellish them. We single them out and varnish them with the lacquer of importance. We stress horoscope stories that have proved remarkably true and repeat those tales of dreams foretelling the Titanic and Twin Towers catastrophes.

At the same time, we forget the vast mass of prediction that is wrong and ignore those sad visionaries who told of Celtic winning last year's Uefa cup and of Kieren Fallon's Ballinger Ridge going first past the post at Lingfield last month.

The end result is that our lives appear to be under all sorts of strange control and are shaped by weird forces, as a hodge-podge of dubious 'experts' still insists, individuals such as Rupert Sheldrake and Arthur Koestler, para-scientists who, for my liking, are given a trifle too much intellectual houseroom by Plimmer and King. That said, this is still a first-rate book.

In fact, most of the strangeness people associate with coincidences lies in the eye of the beholder. As comedian Arnold Brown once asked: 'Why is it that every day there are exactly the right number of stories to fill the newspapers?' Or, for that matter, why is this book review exactly the same length as the space provided for it? I mean, talk about spooky...

More on coincidence

A brief history of coincidence

The myth of meaningful coincidence

Simple maths means that coincidence just doesn't add up