Our dangerous impulse to make sense of murder

‘On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714,’ begins the small, perfect 20th-century novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, ‘the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.’ In the coincidence of crossing the bridge at the same time, explains the writer, Thornton Wilder, these five seemed to have been assembled by pure chance.

Or had they? He entitles this first chapter ‘Perhaps An Accident’. He spends the rest of his book tracing the lives of each until the moment when, in a twang of rope, fate hurled all together into the abyss. Thus is the reader’s interest engaged for the human histories that unfold. But Wilder, an American Christian humanist, falters in his rationalism. His concluding chapter is entitled ‘Perhaps An Intention’.

In fact no evidence of an intention, let alone an Intention, is adduced, and the novel stands as a gem of modern literature without need of any twist of divine intervention.