Tag Archives: coincidence

The other Thomas Prichard: letting go of co-incidences

06 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in history, research

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I find a startling revelation about someone with my subject’s name. It’s the right time, it’s the right place, and it’s in line with certain things I know about the subject, but it’s shocking enough to entirely change the story of that person.

There are only two possibilities. This discovery is full of meaning. Or it has no meaning at all, because it’s not the right person. But if it’s not the right person, and it has no meaning at all, it feels like it should.

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I’ve been researching Kattie’s father, Thomas Henry Prichard (1845-1907). He’s a fascinating figure, viewed next to his daughter – so very conservative, strongly opposed, for example, to a minimum wage, and a writer of modest talent compared to Kattie. He set out to make his fortune in Fiji around 1870, which was eventually where Kattie was born.

I was looking for something else about him when a “Thomas Prichard” suddenly came up in a brief discussion of the Daphne case in one book – he was the co-owner of an Australian ship which kidnapped one hundred islanders for the plantations of Fiji in 1869. The case was dismissed on a technicality, but led to new legislation specifically outlawing the practice. Was this how Prichard spent his youth? Was this one of the stories he avoided telling his daughter? It would make such a sensational story!

If it was true, which it wasn’t. The book in question led me back through so some dubious sources, the chain going back to a Pacific Island enthusiast’s website. All the best sources I could find, including contemporary newspaper reports, started it was William D. Pritchard, not a Thomas H. Prichard, who had been co-owner of that boat. Tom had nothing to do with it. It isn’t even particularly a co-incidence, although it is a sloppy mistake by the scholar.

But it still feels like it should have meaning. If it was a novel, finding out there was another character with the same name in such close proximity would mean much. Either a long lost relative in the 19th century, or a novel driven by the very randomness of the occurrence in the 1990s.

Perhaps one could write a new kind of history composed of co-incidences, near misses, and associations, a tangle of footnotes. I’m not sure what the point would be. It would really be a writer insisting, “this co-incidence is too amazing for me to have to admit it means nothing. I’m making it mean something by writing about it.”

I use this example, but it’s happening all the time, these plot developments that belong to a different story, a character not actually in my book, even if their namesake is. I have to let them go, all the co-incidences and near misses of history.

The Lion, the Dalek, and the Book Depository: the Juxtapositions of Coincidence

22 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in death

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The way we work, we wait for anniversaries to commemorate anything. It seems arbitrary; why not remember the things worth remembering spontaneously? That would never work. We need a roster of commemorations, something like the calendar of saints the church has. Since 9/11, the terrorist attacks has received a big annual commemoration, but already it has become smaller, except for the decade anniversaries. The last time anyone made a concerted commemoration of JFK’s assassination and the beginning of Doctor Who was ten years ago, and now their time has come again.

I like to make something of coincidences; it’s what drives the work of my favourite novelist, Paul Auster. The 22nd November 1963 was a day thick with coincidences. An hour before JFK was mortally wounded so publicly, C.S. Lewis had died quietly in his bedroom with only his brother around; twelve minutes before this, Aldous Huxley had also slipped quietly away. Lewis’s stepson tells of that day.   He learned of his stepfather’s death after news had broken of JFK’s death. Alister McGrath’s biography tells how Lewis was to be buried with few in attendance at the funeral. Christian apologist Peter Kreeft has written an expanded edition of Between Heaven and Hell, an imaginary posthumous conversation between Lewis, Huxley and Kennedy, three representative figures of the twentieth century.

But the anniversary the daily Google search page chooses to commemorate is that of Doctor Who – which doesn’t turn fifty until tomorrow, 23 November. The Doctor is a counterpoint to all those deaths, a messiah who can regenerate, who is not limited by space and time. Perhaps Kreeft should have added him to the conversation, but maybe that would just get silly.

The Monday after JFK was shot, Perth’s most infamous murderer, Eric Edgar Cooke went on trial. I remember the author of Broken Lives, the account of his murders, remarking that Cooke would have been sorely disappointed that his infamy was overshadowed by the death of JFK and then the death of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As much as that is true, Cooke’s years of terror shaped Perth far more than Kennedy”s death. Everyone who remembers that time in Perth has a story about Cooke, has a distinct memory of hot summer nights when they were suddenly too scared to leave the door open or sleep on the verandah.

I’ve read snide remarks by people sick of hearing about JFK’s assassination in these couple of weeks. Yet for me, it is endlessly fascinating, the quintessential American event. It brings together so many great American themes – presidential celebrity, criminal celebrity, the Cold War, the South vs the North, gun culture, and conspiracy theories. It has produced two novels I like immensely – Don DeLillo’s Libra and Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

The Doctor, JFK, C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Eric Edgar Cooke – such a bizarre and fascinating juxtaposition as only coincidence and history can serve up to us.

[Thursday 3pm #8] The Names

21 Thursday May 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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As a child, one of my prized books was a book of baby names and their meanings. Not because I was planning names for my own children, but because I found it fascinating to discover what people’s names ‘really meant’. I thought it gave me insight into their true character. It also gave me a certain type of power, coming to school and announcing to other children what their names meant.

My name is of Hebrew origin and means ‘Gift of God’; I tried to read as much as I could into that. I told James at school he had a very bad name, as his name means ‘Deceiver’. I wondered how anyone could call their child James, knowing this.

And then there was Matthew C., whose name was Greek for ‘Gift of God’. I always wanted to be his best friend, and I thought this linked us in some special way. I told him this theory, but he was not entirely convinced. When he moved to Iceland, he didn’t reply to the letter I sent him.

Perhaps I have disabused myself of some of the primitive notions I had about names as a child, but not entirely. Instinctually, I still feel that other ‘Nathans’ should (a) be friendly to me and (b) have some trait of Nathanness to them. Time has proven neither of these things to be true.

Just as important as the ‘meaning’ of names has been the antecedents for names. I have always loved the tension present in my given names – Nathan David – from the Old Testament figures with those names. Nathan is the brave prophet who rebuked the poet king for adultery and murder. David is my father’s name; that irony interests me too.

‘Nathan’ used to be a fairly rare given name, of which I was very proud. ‘Hobby’ is uncommon too, and it was strange when another family of Hobbys moved to our country town when I was eleven. We didn’t think they were related; years later we discovered they were second cousins, separated from our awareness by family secrets.

One of these Hobbys was called Joshua, and was about the same age as my brother Joshua. I didn’t know what to make of this idea – would it be like having a twin brother to have someone with the same name? Or did it make a person un-unique, did it compromise their specialness, their distinctiveness in the world? I leaned toward the latter interpretation, and thought it a terrible cruelty to be a Smith, or even worse a John Smith.

In the year below me at high school, there were two Laura Smiths. Different years were never known beyond vague rumours, and it took me a long time to work out they were talking about two different Laura Smiths. One of them I knew by sight; the other I didn’t. A year after I graduated, one of them died in a car accident. I wondered if it was the one I knew by sight, or the one I didn’t, and tried not to think of it as sadder if it was the one I knew by sight. I wondered what the surviving Laura felt, if it seemed a close call.

And then, finally, last year I met, in a manner of speaking, the only other Nathan Hobby I know of in the world. I found him on facebook. He’s younger than me and into football, from what I can gather about him. I thought there would have to be something essentially similar about us. But of course, there didn’t have to be. I still get a shock on my facebook feed when I read statements like ‘Nathan Hobby is no longer in a relationship’.

But then perhaps the more remarkable twin, an almost Borgesian one, is my literary twin, Nathaniel Hobbie. When I was working in a public library in 2004, his book arrived about the same time as my book came out. It was called ‘Priscilla and the Pink Planet’ and it’s about a little girl obsessed with pink. His career has been more successful than mine so far; he’s followed up with four other books about Priscilla.

It sounds like a Vonnegutian alter ego for me; I even started a novel called Lazarus the Pacifist Superhero with Nathaniel Hobbie as the main character. It makes it seem there must be some power to names and that out in the world are variations on each person.

Do you have a twin out there in the world?