All is delicious, concentrated stillness, the previously twitchy Oscar, Lucinda observes, 'all strapped down like Ulysses at the mast'. In Lucinda's cabin the two experience a kind of ecstasy, playing poker together for penny bets. Religion is their ostensible bond: Lucinda seeks Oscar to hear her confession. Lucinda is on the same ship because, having visited London more or less in search of a husband, she has given up hope and decided to return. (Naturally his decision to go is made by tossing a penny, which comes up heads: 'you did not need to be a mind-reader to know that God was sending him to New South Wales'). Oscar, now a clergyman, embarks on a mission to bring Christianity to Australia. Groups of chapters alternate between England and Australia as, we suppose, the paths of Oscar and Lucinda move to some unlikely intersection. Carey sharpens our curiosity about how this will be managed by keeping them separate for almost half the book (they speak to each other for the first time on page 231 of my 520-page edition). The two eponymous characters grow up, in the novel's early chapters, thousands of miles apart, but are destined to be brought together. Oscar and Lucinda, being a love story, has a pattern implied in its title. When she visits London, her mother's friend George Eliot complains that when George Lewes takes Lucinda out for tea, she attempts 'to seduce him into a game of chance'. Meanwhile, over in Australia, Lucinda, a young lady with feminist sympathies and a large inheritance, is also becoming addicted to gambling. Naturally, at Newmarket and Newbury, Catterick and Sandown Park, he sees 'God's hand everywhere about'. For, being a connoisseur of the pattern beneath apparent randomness, Oscar, whom Wardley-Fish supposes an innocent abroad, has a peculiar gift for gambling. He needs a companion for the races, and Oscar's fate is sealed by the error. Later, as an odd, solitary student at Oxford, he is accidentally chosen as a gambling companion by the roguish Wardley-Fish, who knocks on his door mistaking it for the college room of another undergraduate. Every day the boy throws lots under 'the terrible pressure of eternity'. By a private process of divination, casting a stone on to a lettered grid, he perceives that his father's faith is false, and that he should desert him for the household of the local Anglican vicar. Oscar, brought up in mid-19th-century Devon by his loving but utterly inflexible father, a leading member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, believes that happenstance is in fact providence. Partly this is by having leading characters who are themselves fascinated by chance.

Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda is a beautifully managed narrative, but one that respects accident. H ow can a novel be true to chance? Novels aspire to be level with life, but the sense of pattern that all good narrative provides can seem unlifelike.

Oscar and lucinda by peter carey