Tales of Protection, by Erik Fosnes Hansen, translated by Nadia Christensen

Any resemblance is entirely coincidental...

In this novel by Erik Fosnes Hansen, Lea is going through the effects of a great-uncle whose Norwegian estate she has inherited. She comes across notebooks in which he recorded cases of coincidence, and the manuscript of a scientific work. This attempts to explain the late recluse's idea of "serialisation", partly derived from the theories of the forgotten Paul Kammerer.

And what is serialisation? It's "the opposite of causation", and closer to coincidence: "a constant repetition or accumulation in time and space of... similar things and events". This is the principle embodied in the fictions that make up Tales of Protection. Lea's great-uncle lies dead, yet is able to perceive the deeds and feelings of those left behind. Lea comes to terms with her strange inheritance. We visit a 19th-century lighthouse community in the Swedish Baltic; and Rome in the late 15th century, with a group of scheming artists.

But more significant than the quiddities of background (always presented with imaginative relish) are the similarities of event or reaction that press against the human dramas to give substance to Kammerer's beliefs. So when, at the end, we confront again the old man in his coffin and his beloved Lea, we feel that – however much we have travelled – we have never forsaken this pair.

Hansen is obsessed by the propinquity of different existences. The idea is memorably revealed in his teasingly complex descriptions of insect activity. Two points are being made. First, both insects and mankind are expressions of the same mysterious forces. Second, the closed world of the beehive may seem at variance with the accidents of human life. Yet, just as we can discern eruptions of chaos into the bees' ordered existence, we can find symmetry, not to say ruthless purpose, in the most haphazard of human histories.

In the second section (on a Baltic islet), we face ghastly fates: men dead through violent seas and human error; a young girl visited by random-seeming epileptic fits. But when we stand back, we find a shape to them, one with a solemn beauty. That shape is also detectable in the story of Lea, her great-uncle, and the rival artists.

To make a multiplicity of coincidences at once startling and cohesive is an extraordinarily difficult task. In narrow terms, I do not think Hansen quite succeeds. The binding story, of Lea and her great-uncle, is too strange to possess the representative qualities that would justify the stories that follow. Both the supporting evidence for the book's theory, and the evocation of its different worlds, are accorded such a wealth of detail as to give the reader an often fatiguing sense of satiation.

These, however, are faults of presentation rather than imagination. Hansen is a writer of genuine depth of feeling and width of interest. There's nothing better in Tales of Protection than his account of the ape Jacob's grief for his master, Lea's uncle, and Lea's attempt to comfort the animal. This gains from its comparative simplicity a concentration that Hansen often withholds through too much intellectual excitement.