Chance

What’s in a novel’s epigraph – this one for example: ‘In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable’? We might read these words as an elliptical suggestion that the narrative we are about to encounter will raise the question of character. Perhaps we will witness one or more characters struggling to achieve something out of the ordinary – or struggling in entirely unremarkable ways, remaining unremarkable. Such is the stuff of much of the best fiction, after all, as well as the course of most lives.