Two authors and three meaningful coincidences

A chance meeting with Ian McEwan and the alchemy of reading Patrick Harpur's Mercurius

Do you believe in meaningful coincidences? The timely appearance of Mercurius has made me a sceptic.

‘One thing that dreams, myths and literature have in common is a disposition to evade the limitations of time, space and causality. They suggest that beneath the orderly constructs of culture there is another, highly coloured realm which, although it has laws of its own, does not obey the laws on which our scientific world-view depends. Occasionally we find the laws of this other realm disrupting the normal laws of our consensus-reality. For example, Carl Jung exercised himself mightily over one such disruption in the law of cause and effect on which so much of the scientific edifice - including the theory of Evolution - is built. He was referring to the phenomenon of meaningful coincidence.’

Mercurius, Patrick Harpur

About ten years ago, the novelist Ian McEwan wrote a novel called Sweet Tooth. The protagonist was an academic from the University of Sussex called Tom Healy; an expert in the poetry of Edmund Spencer and the Renaissance. A few weeks before the book was due to be published, the author received a call from one of his editors at Random House with a concern about libel. They had found an academic at the University of Sussex who was an expert in the poetry of Edmund Spencer and the Renaissance; his name was Tom Healy. It was a cosmic coincidence. McEwan decided to change the name of the novel’s protagonist to Tom Haley, in order to keep the typeface for the book’s printing and ensure a smooth publication, free from accusations of slander.

A few weeks later McEwan received an email from his alma mater, the University of Sussex, inviting him to a celebratory dinner where he would receive an award for his literary achievements. Of course, McEwan bumped into the man who had “just fallen out” of his new novel, only to discover that Tom Healy was presenting him the evening’s award. To receive congratulation from a fictional character of your own creation is surely more than any novelist can hope for.

Between the ages of 20 and 27, I made the mistake of trying to write a novel. It was inspired by a story within a story in McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, written by the fictional Tom Haley, where the atheist twin of a country Parson gives a Sunday sermon to his brother’s credulous congregation, following a Saturday night drinking bout that had left the priest hungover. Embarking on my own story, working title The Parson’s Port, I soon discovered the pitfalls of failing to plot. But after a judicious bit of plotting, I found that the process of writing was more like discovering a story as a reader than making it up myself. I was heavily influenced by what I was thinking at the time, be those thoughts relevant or not, but also that I had become beholden to a set of characters that made a constant set of demands on me as their author. For after the early chapters of megalomania, the possibilities were no longer infinite.

About half way through the first draft, I found myself in an ancient monastery with a secret past more primeval than Christianity. Though I didn’t know what this secret was, I had a vague idea that it could involve alchemy and that this would work perfectly with an as yet unresolved mystery in the story where a large quantity of gold is discovered. But as with my lack of prudence in failing to plot the story, all I knew of alchemy was that it was to be looked down on, if it was to be considered at all.

Joseph Wright’s The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus

About a week later, I received a late birthday present from an uncle; Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Getting books you wouldn’t have even picked up off the shelf in a shop is a treat for any reader, but this one came with a little more elegance than a thoughtful gift. It was a coincidence; a book that once upon a time sold highly sought after second hand copies for hundreds of pounds by those seeking to make a grand fortune, revered in the Literary Review as ‘The most explicit account of the alchemical art ever published.’

Upon receiving my present of Mercurius, I recalled to my uncle a piece of wisdom imparted by McEwan, unaware that this would be something of an allusion of a further coincidence to come. I have always remembered a phrase he used in advising aspiring scribblers; that if as a writer you don’t read, “you are liable to be hugely influenced by the writers you haven’t read”.

Or perhaps worse still, to write a story that has already been written. 

To my surprise, there were a number of parallels in Mercurius and my own story. Both stories begin with a search for gold of mysterious provenance, while a peculiar death seems to be connected. The central character is country vicar in the late 40's (to Harpur’s early 50's), with the influence of metaphysical forces hinted at, but that are always shrouded from plain sight. In my unfinished novel, the main character uncovers the truth through the fairy tales of white, red and black knights - all of which were written into my story well before I became aware of the colours’ symbolism and order within the alchemical process. An explicable enough coincidence perhaps, but combined with the first, a primal part of my brain started to make a pattern.

The final coincidence in this series was the most unusual. Travelling down to Cheltenham, with Mercurius in my hand, I was walking along the platform of Paddington Station when I saw Ian McEwan sitting with his wife in the first class carriage of my train. As something of a fan of his better books, and with the central character of my novel having been inspired by one of his stories within a story in Sweet Tooth, I decided to accost him and damn the embarrassment. 

McEwan was kind and gracious, if a little surprised and perhaps keen to get rid of me (his wife still more so). The wry, well-worn reply “Oh, you have read all of my books…”. Feeling rather smug, I walked down to my second class seat with my heart beating a little faster. But as the train pulled away from that modern day cathedral and began to roll through outer London, an undiagnosed thought was nagging at the back of my mind as the grey flashing past the window turned to green. 

One of the frustrating things about these kinds of coincidences is that there is rarely an authority that you can appeal to for an answer that relishes the mystery enough to provide an interesting answer. Why did these three things happen in order? The Baader-Meinhof effect seems a simple if clinical solution; whereby you tend to notice things more immediately after having seen them for the first time. Meanwhile, the Scientist Peter Atkins has written more bluntly that the Why question is a simply “Silly Question”.

Is it?

As a minor aside, as with the timely appearance of Mercurius, one question I frequently ask myself whenever I move house is Why I nearly always end up living at a house addressed No. 11. Until the age of 26, all four of the houses that I had lived in were addressed No. 11 (I include one 11a). At the age of 30, having just moved out of another No. 11, five of the seven properties I have lived in have had the same number. Rather inelegantly, I was born on the 12th.

However, looking into the author of the book that had exorcised my belief in random chance, I found an authority figure with an email address. I emailed Patrick Harpur and laid out the facts as I found them, and explained how they had gracefully lined up. I didn’t expect a reply. 

Dear Mr —,

Thanks for your amusing message.  

I tend to find that the problem with meaningful coincidences is that one senses meaning but doesn’t know what the meaning of that meaning is!  They don’t seem to go anywhere…  Except, perhaps, we can’t help reading them as a sign that we’re somehow on the right track, as if keyed into some larger pattern of life.  

However, now that you’re writing you’ll probably run into a lot more synchronicities. It may be because writers have to sink down into the imaginative realm where images naturally connect, both psychically and in fact.  

Every researcher knows the phenomenon of the ‘library angel’ where you despair of finding the book you need – whereupon a book falls from the shelf and opens at the very page you require. Uncles etc. can often play this part.  

It’s a side effect of any Quest, perhaps. I go into this a bit in my book Daimonic Reality where I describe the state of mind – with particular reference to a writer called John Keel – in which synchronicities come thick and fast, persuading you that you’re on the edge of some major revelation, only to find that you’ve been a victim of Hermes the trickster.   

I expect you know the excellent synchronicity cited by Jung.

Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe events that are linked by meaning but not causality. A synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence. To illustrate the point Jung related an anecdote from the memoirs of Émile Deschamps. He writes:

A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orléans, was once given a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum-pudding in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in: M. de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the party by mistake.

Reference: Nicklouras

I was interested that your book has parallels to mine. It’s not as odd as the fact that there have been, to my knowledge, no novels about alchemy for a century or so, only for my book to come out in the same fortnight as Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding – which scooped all the prizes even as mine sank without trace! 

It’s not that alchemy isn’t going on all the time in the depths of all our unconsciousnesses; it’s more that the Zeitgeist seemed to require that two examples of it should break the surface at the same time.

I’m so glad you enjoyed Mercurius.

Good luck,

Patrick Harpur

Perhaps I was onto something. Perhaps these three coincidences were only the beginning of 11 coincidences that would reveal something mysterious and help me finish my novel! Perhaps I was doing my best to write anything but that unfinished novel.

Perhaps I should review Mercurius.

Harpur had clearly done a lifetime of research and deep thinking before writing Mercurius, as exemplified in the reams of dense footnotes that accompany references to treaties on the alchemical Art or the philosophers that practiced it throughout history. Despite coming to the book with the same amount of scepticism as I imagine you have in reading my unlikely story, I found it hard to read Harpur’s treasury of essentially forgotten knowledge and not come to the conclusion that alchemists knew something that the modern world does not.

‘How are ‘heretics’ treated nowadays? How, for instance, does the average enlightened progressive scientific wholesome individual regard alchemy? He confidently asserts - purely on the basis of ignorance, prejudice and intellectual idleness - that alchemy was merely a superstitious myopic groping towards modern chemistry. An alchemist would not now be treated seriously enough to be persecuted, or even ridiculed. He’d be ignored. The Philosophers’ Stone - that winged platypus of the Art! - is dismissed as a myth, by which is meant the fantastic invention of childish minds. Well, bugger that.’

As for the literary merit of this book, Harpur is a skilled and thoughtful writer. There are certain passages where the prose is rich but finely balanced, if not simply poetic. He delicately weaves insights into the alchemical Philosophy within a grand narrative that itself mirrors the process taking place within the two main characters and their struggle towards two different kinds of truth.

To finish a review, which by its mere length would suggest I still cannot plot, I must return to Ian McEwan. For although I am sure that he would disagree with anything that strays too far from a liberal, scientific mindset, to apply his maxim to Mercurius about writers needing to read; it is only by reading books that you think you disagree with that you work out what you actually think. In the process, like an alchemist, you may discover truths other than those you set out to discover or disprove. And like the rational McEwan, it is only by reading those books that you avoid the risk of being influenced by ideas that you disbelieve when you read the first page. Reading, like alchemy, is both a conscious and an unconscious process.

Mercurius is an indulgent descent deep into an imaginative realm which is far older than your childhood; when adults still told stories about the world around us and the world within us. Stories which when told together, form an elegant pattern that we are the richer for seeking meaning in.

‘The more we imbue the world with imagination, the more the world is ensouled - and the more soul it returns to us, singing with meaning.’