Coincidence: A Novel
Page 28
My first novel, The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder, tells the story of a young man who sets out to catalogue his brain. He locks himself away in the empty library of his manor house, closes his curtains, and thus insulated from the world, starts his grand project. It will, he imagines, take him three years to record every scrap of information in his brain, every memory, every conversation, every half-remembered lyric. But he’s wrong. It takes him thirty years, and it costs him his life. Max Ponder and I share many of the same memories. We grew up in the same Nairobi suburbs, went to the same schools, and shared, as eleven-year-olds, a similar trauma in Uganda.
Would Uganda be a recurring theme for me? In 2010 I started work on Coincidence. I had been struggling to choose between two competing ideas for a second novel. In my first idea, I would revisit East Africa. I wanted to tell a story set in West Nile, a tale that would cast light upon the decades of civil war and conflict the region has suffered. In particular I planned to feature the monstrous activities of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. I wanted to expose this dark piece of modern history. Perhaps, I thought, I could set it in a mission, like the one I had visited as a teenager.
My second idea was more prosaic, but better developed. In this story I would explore determination and free will. The central character would be an academic, a creature of science who could not believe that the universe would do anything but play dice with our lives. His worldview would be challenged by a series of encounters with coincidence. I made the decision to go with this idea. A week before Christmas I started to write. One winter morning, I was walking my dog across the fields behind our home, contemplating the character of Azalea. She would have a more exotic background than the one I had planned for Thomas. Perhaps, I thought, she could grow up in Africa. And before I reached my gate I had an insight. Maybe this was my Uganda novel after all. All I had to do was to find a way to get Azalea to Acholiland.
So this was why, four months later, Jon and I found ourselves waiting on the Nile wharf at Laropi for the ferry that would carry us across to West Nile. I had to go back if I was to write Azalea’s story. The civil war in this corner of Africa was over. The LRA was in retreat. Elections had just been held. This was a country and a people that I felt I knew. Under a blazing sun we boarded the ancient vessel. There were hippos watching us as the ropes were untied, and we started across the great river to the green hills beyond.
About the book
Explaining Kony
THIS STORY is a work of the imagination. All the characters in this book are fictional, and none is based on any person, living or dead. Except:
Joseph Kony is a real person. His cult-like Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been operating in Uganda, Sudan, and the Congo for more than twenty years. The BBC reports that tens of thousands have been killed by the LRA, and one and a half million people have been displaced. Thousands of children have been abducted. No one knows how many have been mutilated. As far as we know, Joseph Kony is alive and still evades capture.
The abduction of children from the Sacred Heart Secondary Boarding School for Girls and the St Mary’s Girls School were real events. In March 1989, the LRA raided St Mary’s Girls School and abducted ten schoolgirls and thirty-three seminarians and villagers. Nine of the ten girls eventually escaped. The tenth was killed some years later.
As recently as Christmas Eve 2008, according to the United Nations peacekeeping force, the Lord’s Resistance Army massacred 189 people and abducted twenty children during a celebration sponsored by the Catholic Church in Faradje, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Joseph Kony is ranked as the seventh most-wanted criminal in the world. Like me, you may be left wondering who the other six are, and how their crimes could possibly exceed his.
BBC reports have described how Kony created an aura of fear and mysticism around himself. His rebels follow strict rules and rituals. They are commanded always to make the sign of the cross before fighting. They are also instructed to take oil and draw a cross on their chest, forehead and shoulder, and to make a cross in oil on their guns. They believe that the oil is the power of the Holy Spirit.
In 2003, Uganda’s parliamentary defense committee proposed hiring South African mercenaries to “eliminate” LRA rebels. Uganda’s president squashed the idea, saying that the suggestion to hire mercenaries showed a lack of confidence in Uganda’s army.
The missions depicted in Langadi and Kakuma were invented for the purposes of the story, and are not intended to resemble any missions present or past.
As for free will: No one can say for certain if we have it or we don’t. Neuroscientists have developed ways of measuring brain activity that suggest that the unconscious part of the brain is active in making a decision around half a second before the conscious brain, and some have theorized that this is proof of determinism. Not every neuroscientist accepts these conclusions, and you may prefer to go along with Søren Kierkegaard, who argued that God would hardly have wasted his time creating us if all we were going to do was to follow a predetermined path. Whatever you choose to believe, you will probably want to agree with the philosopher John Locke, who argued that the whole debate is largely irrelevant. If it feels to us like free will, then let’s treat it as free will and get on with our lives. A lesson that Thomas Post, eventually, may have grasped.
Read on
Further Reading and Information
For a very readable account that touches on the LRA and the Gulu abductions, I recommend Jane Bussmann’s The Worst Date Ever—Or How It Took a Comedy Writer to Expose Africa’s Secret War, a book that pulls very few punches when it comes to exposing the murky presence of the LRA in Uganda. The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted by Matthew Green also provides a harrowing personal view of the search for Kony.
My favorite book about Africa is a beautiful collection of essays by the late Ryszard Kapuściński called The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life. Kapuściński was, for many years, the only Polish journalist reporting from Africa, writing for readers who knew little or nothing about the continent. His reports still transport me to the heat and the dust, the sounds and the smells of Africa in a way that no other writer can do.
There is a real coincidence authority, although I didn’t learn about him until after this book was written. His name is David Spiegelhalter. He is Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. Speigelhalter is the co-author, with Michael Blastland, of The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers about Danger, which explores some of the mathematics of coincidence and risk. By coincidence it turns out that we share a close mutual friend. I have yet to ask him to calculate the chances of that.
The best known philosophical treatise on coincidence is Jung’s 1950 book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. However, I would hesitate to recommend this rather rambling account to any but the most ardent student of the discipline. Arthur Koestler’s new-age exploration of the subject in The Roots of Coincidence was a popular read in the 1970s, attempting to bring together explanations for coincidence, parapsychology, and quantum theory. I’m sure both of these books would have been on Thomas Post’s bookshelves.
Uganda is one of the best tourist destinations in the world for the adventurous traveler. The riverboat trip up the Nile to Murchison Falls passes locations where they filmed The African Queen and where Ernest Hemingway survived a plane crash. It is also a fantastic place to see hippos, elephants, and plenty of other wildlife. For intrepid explorers, I recommend the Bradt Uganda guide.
There are several charities that work in the countries affected by the LRA. Here are three you might want to consider supporting: War Child (www.warchild.com) works with children and communities in Uganda, helping displaced young people to rebuild their lives. SOS Children’s Villages (www.child-soldier.org) supports more than 250 children of conflict and their mothers from their centre in Gulu. Invisible Children (www.invisiblechildren.com) is a high-profile campaigning group that tracks
LRA incidents and warns remote communities of possible LRA attacks. They also work with rural communities providing personal finance training for women, ensuring access to safe drinking water, and helping with education and literacy.
About the Author
J . W. Ironmonger was born and raised in East Africa. This is his first novel published in the United States. He lives in rural Shropshire, England, with his wife, Sue.
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Also by J. W. Ironmonger
The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © Peter Szawlowski/Getty Images
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
COINCIDENCE. Copyright © 2014 by John Ironmonger. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt from Goldfinger Copyright © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1959 www.ianfleming.com
Reproduced with permission of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, London.
First Harper Perennial edition published 2014.
ISBN 978-0-06-230989-1
EPUB Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN 9780062309907
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