Paul Auster- Oracle Night

Oracle Night

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2003

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.”

An unpredicted but undoubted discovered throughout writing this humble blog has been a personal improvement in the average amount of focus I put in to reading a book. It wasn't instantaneous upon starting out, but falling in to the habit of reviewing each book often led me to begin composing short snippets in my head as I read; as a way of processing things as they go along. Back in the yea olden days of pre-blog, I was sometimes guilty of lightly speed-reading books without properly absorbing enough of what I was looking at, making the whole exercise somewhat of a waste of time. This was especially true with library books, the advancing date on each encouraging me to rush through to the detriment of the experience. This is what happened the first time I read Oracle Night by Paul Auster.

Picador edition

Fast-forward five years of so, and after buying my own copy and then eventually picking it up off the to-read pile, I sat down with a much more concentrated attention span, and, within only a few pages it became quickly apparent that Oracle Night is a novel that deserved and required my full attention; packed as it is in the author's familiar style consisting heavily of post-modern symbolism, meta-fiction, elongated (but relevant) tangents, and varying degrees of magical realism. As is common with Auster's fiction, he makes his lead protagonist a writer; Sidney Orr is a successful novelist living in Brooklyn (another of the author's tropes, from the days of his first smash hit The New York Trilogy) who, at the start of the novel, is slowly recovering from a life-threatening illness. Written in the first-person, Auster establishes Orr as a normal, thoughtful and imaginative man, and introduces his small, close-knit environment consisting of his wife Grace and their long-time close friend and fellow author John Trause. Sidney meets the novel's fourth and final 'real' (I'll get to that in a second) character of any relevance, Mr. Chang, when he somewhat randomly ambles into Chang's new stationary store in downtown Brooklyn, where he finds himself compelled to buy a particular unassuming blue notebook, in which he begins to flesh out what he hopes will become his latest novel. 

For the first half of the book at least, Sidney's new story is given as much space and detail as its framework- though despite what the some of the many lazy reviews of Oracle Night I've found around the net suggest, it ends abruptly with plenty of the main story to go- but it's only the first (and largest) of several extended tangents produced via the blue notebook. It did, however, quickly endear me to Oracle Night through its basis in another novel I greatly enjoyed (and must re-read and in all honesty re-review) in pulp detective fiction writer Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; Trause suggests to Orr to re-imagine a full version of an anecdote that Hammett's classic gumshoe Sam Spade tells in Falcon, about a man who survives a random near-death experience and from that moment decides to abandon his life completely and begin a new one. Sidney Orr's protagonist does the same thing in greater detail, and with this story within a story Auster manages not only to tell a compelling yarn (with a postmodern theme similar to Auster's earlier novels, particularly, for me, The Music of Chance) but add to the depths of both Orr's character and the ethereal background tone of the novel that doesn't definitively move into realistic fantasy but goes as far as it can otherwise. 

Paul Auster's serious face

  As the pace of the events in Sidney Orr's life quicken towards the end of the novel, following a series of tangential stories and experiences that deeply effect the narrator's thoughts, things come to more of an organised head, leading to a somewhat conclusive ending that satisfied my curiosity as to the fate of Orr and his wife (who I found myself very attached to, perhaps more so than any other of Auster's leading characters) without being too definitive. In an act of meta-blogging I'd been heavily thinking about the intents and effects of Oracle Night long before I'd finished it, composing mini-reviews in my head, many instantly forgotten. The ending of the book didn't change much in terms of my overall perspective of the novel, and could perhaps be criticised as somewhat of a lacklustre finish. Essentially though the very nature of this book is the entwining of the various narratives and storylines in it, and how they ultimately effect the life of Sidney, particularly in relation to the strange blue notebook. I've seen it described as an exploration of synchronicity, a less-defined look at fate, choices and the power of narrative (thinking about it now there are some similar notes to a key theme and idea of Terry Pratchett; narrativium).

If you've looked at the little goodreads blogspot gadget somewhere down the right hand side of this page, you may have seen that there I rated Oracle Night as five stars out of five, essentially a perfect score (though I'd never call it a perfect book, it's just that taking the average standard of books listed on goodreads and the inflated average scores that pretty much everything recieves, by those standards this book is absolutely five stars). Though I place that opinion based on the flawless quality of prose, layered characters, and masterly composition of varying complicated ideas to produce a literary work of art, I wouldn't necessarily offer Oracle Night up as a book everyone will enjoy. There's a certain madness in the style that relies on a prior appreciation of the authors work and certain expectations based on that appreciation, so it's not the perfect place to start with the author (no matter what the front cover blurb declares), I'd recommend Mr. Vertigo for pure storytelling or The New York Trilogy for in-your-face edgy postmodernism. Luckily for me I think I was in the perfect place and time to enjoy Oracle Night, much improved over speed-reading for the sake of a return date. A fascinating, uncompromising book.