(courtesy Ultimo Press)
When it comes to Sliding Doors territory, that exciting or maddening place, depending on your perspective, where possibilities are endless and change, incremental or large is a constant, there are always a multitude of ways things can either come together or go spinning far apart.
At least, trapped as we are in a binary way of looking at the world (though many of us are trying to scramble free and appreciate the world’s complexity for what it actually is), that how we see things.
But what if, wonders the inventively fun and seriously heartfelt rom-com Bound to Happen by Jonathon Shannon (which is a love letter in its own way to the city of its setting, Sydney, Australia), all those either/or moments were small near-misses, almost-theres that come agonisingly close to fruition but never quite make it … until, of course, they do.
But, naturally enough, this being a playfully imaginative rom-com that sets out, Sleep in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail style, to keep its two possibly lovestruck protagonists apart as long as possible, the eventual resolution of all those missed-it-by-that-much (yes, that is a Get Smart reference and yes I am a child of the ’70s, thank you) is well and truly worth waiting around for.
For a start, there’s a great deal of fun to be hd simply with Shannon expertly managing to keep apart music student Tom, who isn’t after fame and stardom so much as the ability to create pieces of music that matter and say something, and astrophysics PhD candidate Sophie, who’s all science and not a bit of fate mandates anything to happen, in ways that will have you groaning with how close they come to their destined happy-ever-after before spiralling off away from each other again.
Later, watching the ceiling constellations fade out of existence in the dark, Sophie thought for the first time that she might have to re-evaluate her idea that nothing ever happened for a reason, that the whole universe was nothing more than an indifferent alignment of celestial bodies.
Perhaps because you’re comforted by the fact that Tom and Sophie will eventually end up in the same place at the same time – one of the delights of romantic comedies, and not the albatross-around-the-narrative-neck its detractors make it out to be, is that we know that the ending will be certain and sweet – you end up having a great deal of fun with the way in their proximity ebbs and flows all the way throughout Bound to Happen.
Tom is performing at a bar that Sophie walks into just as he’s finishing up his set. Or Tom walks past Sophie at the first of the graduations she has featured in the novel, moving out of sight just as she clocks him. And so it goes on and gloriously, wonderfully on in a story that keeps dangles the possibility that this is it before complicating and cruelling, in the best way, our expectations yet again.
Adding even more complexity to proceedings is the fact that in pursuit of a song that Tom is writing as a love letter to his far more successful indie singer girlfriend, whose first overseas will either prove Tom’s maxim that they are meant to be together or they will never were really a thing in the first place, he writes to the physics department at Sydney University where Sophie is based, striking up a connection, albeit only by email that keeps them connected at critical key points where they might otherwise spin away from each other.
(courtesy Ultimo Press)
This device very much embodies the You’ve Got Mail-esque feel of Bound to Happen which for all its previous rom-com inspiration is very much a creature of the 21st century and of our fare ore interconnected age.
While we like to think digital connectivity has knitted us together in ways previous technologies were never capable of, the fact remains that it is still entirely possible, especially in a city of five million people, to never actually meet or see the people with whom you are in 0s and 1s contact.
Such as their life trajectories, and their binding into relationships that we don’t know won’t see the far future but are there to add obstacle and challenge to the short-to-medium term, that while they go far beyond chatting about string theory and the randomness or otherwise of the universe, they never manage to find themselves in close physical proximity in a way that connects their email relationship with their more day-to-day phsyicality.
So much for the digital world conquering all, huh?
But then, you could well argue that if it wasn’t for the email correspondence, they might never have come into contact with each other although the mischievously serious near-misses that pepper Bound to Happen would suggest that was always a lingering possibility anyway.
‘You always believed we were supposed to be together,’ Poppy said [to Tom]. ‘That I was something the universe had orchestrated just for you.’ She tilted her head to one side, her copper hair falling over her shoulder. ‘How can my love compete with that? How could anyone’s?’
See, how fiendishly fun and complex it can all that be?
Far from being the frothy confection of nothingness that its detractors paint it, rom-com novels like Bound to Happen actually come with a great deal of depth and grounding.
Here are two people who you know are meant to be together, regardless of Tom’s romanticism and Sophie’s cold-blooded facts, nothing but the facts, and who suspect as much as their email chats venture into realms where string theory has no usable commentary (Sophie may beg to disagree), who are trying to work out who they are and what they want just as we all are.
This is no merry romp down the rom-com lane of mindless love hearts and bunches of red roses; both these people have existential issues to resolve, life decisions of great import to make, and people with whom they want to connect, the bonds of which relationships may last or may not, and so when Bound to Happen runs it wonderfully enlivening course, it feels like here are two people just like us who deserve all the happiness in the world they can find.
But, and here’s another serious realisation, novels like Bound to Happen make you understand how fantastically lucky you are to find the love of your life; because while you can argue all those near-misses have to add up to something eventually or fate will eventually gets it lovestruck way, the truth is we come as perilously close to missing all kinds of wondrously good things in our life as we do finding them.
It’s a luck of the draw, or is it, and it’s in that fertile wondering and that destined middle ground that Bound to Happen plays, and plays to absolutely gorgeous and swooningly fun effect, giving you the sort of love story that feels as random or certain as life itself and which, quite possibly, distills life down to the very things that either make us or break us and which in the end, give us all the good things we have.