By Chance

Corrick provides the reader with a supply of twists and turns that cause one to pause and think about what if that happened to me? Bolsover is a guy who seems to observe life and yet determines to engage in it when it comes to women. He studies his need to connect with other human beings and seeks to answer the deep questions of life which he learns only lead him to more questions rather than any answers. I do not read many novels since I am a nonfiction reader, but this book caught my eye. The character development of Bolsover reminded me of Anne Tyler's characters who seek to find a balance between engagement and contemplations over life. We just drop into Bolsover's life where he is and then drop out when he's done with us.

I was taken aback for a good portion of this book. It's so... Well, 'playful' at the beginning. Or 'whimsical'. Or, 'wonderfully skewed'. However you choose to describe it, you can't help but be intrigued by what might lay ahead, given such a start. What's ahead is a satisfying read. Quirky in places, sombre in others...but all the way through, a great writer telling a unique tale. I won't give away anything here plotwise, it's best to go in cold, but I will say that this slim read fills you up nicely. Highly recommended to those for whom character studies rather than a careening plotline appeals.

I loved Martin Corrick's "By Chance". The narrator, James Bolsover, is a man enthralled by words and the power of words to create order out of chaos. He believes that words and the names we give to things, the list we put things on and the definitions we give them, help us through the muddle of existing. The power of words. He uses words to create understanding, both of difficult technical issues (he is an engineer) and of the really big questions, like tragedy (Bolsover struggles to define it), seduction (and desire: Bolsover struggles more) and culpability (the biggest struggle of all for our Bolsover: how much is anything our fault? Too much in some ways, too little, in others). Bolsover uses words most charmingly when he creates a beautiful, fictional place to allow his wife to bloom, much as she creates a garden to allow her flowers space and light and air to bloom. But what happens when words fail? Perhaps that is the definition of tragedy. Early inthe book, Bolsover asks "If fiction is not concerned to understand, what is its subject? Is its purpose merely to pass the time?" No, the purpose of great writing -- and reading great books -- is most definitely to understand. Corrick is clearly a man of words and a righteous preacher for their power. A great writer has the the power to cobble together words and deliver to us, the readers, a new way of seeing and hearing and understanding. Great writing brings things together, to mesh (borrowing a word used in By Chance at different points) different ways of looking at something into a cohesive and yet unique and distinct way of looking at everything. Corrick delivers what readers want with every beautiful sentence and each fully rounded thought, in his completely articulated vision and his perfectly realized (and very real) characters, and even in the half-wisps of this and that he throws out via Bolsover's roving thoughts, wisps that add up in the end to a conclusion reached well before poor old Bolsover climbs the hill. Words alone are not enough, though. Here enters "chance." Corrick shows us that the opposite of tragedy is the chance occurrence of a human reaching understanding through words: we reach glory, grace, peace, through understanding. Corrick writes of the birds having wings, and using them to fly, that is why they have wings. And we have emotions and understanding; we have hearts to feel and brains to read with, and that is how we fly. There is a plot twist in By Chance and I don't love twists generally. Nor did I find this twist necessary: Bolsover would have gotten to his bench on the hill overlooking the ocean regardless. His questions and his searchings for the way to fix things runs up against the absolutely unfixable fact of death. Afterwards he feels guilt, twist or not twist. It is human, frailly and beautifully so, to feel guilt when someone dies. Guilt that we did not do enough for them when they were alive, guilt that we did not fight hard enough fo

This elegant novel starts slowly, but the reader should pay attention to each unfolding detail, for when the full story is exposed, it is a revelation. Corrick writes in the contemplative style of John Banville, of Grahame Swift -- he creates a story that is deceptively simple that evolves into something different altogether. The enigmatic details are disclosed slowly, but the narrative never drags. At 230 pages, it is deceptively slim, but packs more whallop per page than many other books twice its length.