London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981
If his life was not actually being manipulated, Brock nevertheless had the feeling now and then that someone was out there, signalling. 1963 was the year he began noticing coincidences.
First, Max, an old army acquaintance, has written a story set during the American Civil War; and that war happened to be Brock’s chief obsession. Then Father Drew contributed the story of the sermon and the telephone call. And Becky, hunted for high and low, turned out to be living next door. Finally on a trip to Nubia with her, he came across not only Father Drew again, but a few other complications connected with neither sermons nor telephones, but the American Civil War.
Brock, a radio producer determined to beat television at its own game, decided to tackle head-on one of the most spectacular of visual subjects, the rescue of the Abu Simbel temples; and the whole enterprise coincided with Becky’s withdrawal, with Max’s illness, and with the shifting and rearrangement of the complex relationship between Brock, Becky, Max and his wife Jill. It develops in a way that could, in more senses than one, be described as coincidental.
