What if Susan’s bus had been late? What if my friend hadn’t been there? What seemed like fate – the first moment of forty years of intense happiness – was in fact the result of a series of chances

Analysing now the forking paths that led up to this moment, this encounter in the theatre, makes me go retrospectively weak at the knees. It turned out that Susan, also a student at the university, was working in the library that night and had spontaneously decided to go to the theatre herself – alone, just as I had.  What made us, entirely independently, decide to go and see a play? It was even more sheer luck that in the theatre that night was a mutual friend who was in a position to introduce us. As you look back at moments like these you realise just how incredibly easy it would be for these happy accidents not to have occurred. What if Susan’s bus had been late? What if I had decided not to go to the bar at the interval? What if I hadn’t spotted my friend? What if my friend hadn’t been there?  What seemed like fate – the first moment of forty years of intense happiness – was in fact the result of a series of chances. Good luck, yes. But it was luck, not something willed, not some cogitated choice deliberately made.

The view backwards is something I make myself do from time to time just to remind myself of the role that luck plays in our lives – good luck and bad luck, of course: one is not guaranteed happy endings. And looking backwards at the journey we’ve all made to get to where we are today will confirm to any sentient being that we are barely in control of our destinies.  I look back at my own life and see the fact that my parents decided to go and work in Africa before I was born as being one of the defining events of my own biography and life as a writer.  I see the fact that I never got a single job that I was interviewed for – at the time it seemed like relentless bad luck – actually compelled me to concentrate my youthful energies on becoming a writer. And so on. The forking paths in my own particular garden divide exponentially – and that applies to everyone.

Consequently I believe that luck is the element that shapes our lives at the end of the day – that roll of the cosmic dice that we experience on an hourly basis. In my novel Any Human Heart I explore this theme with great concentration. The central character, Logan Mountstuart (who has led a real roller-coaster of a life), declares that a human life is just the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck that a particular person has experienced.  Some people seem to have more good luck than others; some people seem very unlucky. But in actual fact the two piles of luck tend to equal out over a long lifespan.

In my new collection of short stories The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth, I investigate this idea of the view backwards in a story called “The Road Not Taken”.  In fact the story actually goes backwards through time the better to show how randomly our lives take shape – almost the inverse of Borges’s story.  The title comes from a famous poem by the American poet Robert Frost. The key lines are:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth:

And took the other…

Forking paths again. We all do it – look down the other road as far as we can and make a decision. But at the end of the day what you meet on the road you have taken will all be down to luck.