Paul Auster: Oracle Night

Reviewed by STEPHEN JEWELL

Sydney Orr, the celebrated author at the heart of Paul Auster's eighth novel, suffers from a condition that any writer could sympathise with: writer's block.

Orr, who has recently recovered from a near-fatal illness, lives a predictable but contented existence with his young, all-too-perfect wife Grace in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Orr's creative juices are unexpectedly awoken after he purchases a beautiful blue notebook from the Paper Palace, a ramshackle stationary store run by an enigmatic Chinese man named M.R. Chang.

Orr ignores a friend's warning that the notebooks can cast a disastrously beguiling spell, and plunges headlong into a new story from which he cannot extricate himself.

In shades of Auster's metaphysical detective classic The New York Trilogy, Orr's tale is inspired by an episode from Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, in which a character abruptly disappears and attempts to start a new life after suffering a near-death experience.

In Orr's version, Nick Bowen, a New York book editor, abandons his wife and runs off to far-off Kansas City after falling forlornly in love with Rosa Leightmann, who had brought him a long-lost manuscript by her famous late aunt, called Oracle Night.

In some of Oracle Night's most evocative passages, Nick falls in with Ed Victory, a World War II vet turned taxi driver who recruits him to put into order his exhaustive collection of telephone books from America and all around the world, including one poignant, pre-Holocaust 1937-38 Warsaw edition.

Unfortunately, Orr's story ends suddenly with many loose ends left dangling, which is precisely Auster's point. He then embarks upon a radical screenplay adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, with equally unsatisfactory results.

Strangely, Auster seems unaware of the actual recent film of The Time Machine, which was directed by H.G.'s grandson, Simon Wells, who was unceremoniously forced to resign before completion in a twist that neatly reflects Oracle Night's debate about creative morality.

Auster has long explored the increasingly blurred edge between reality and fiction and has often used authors as protagonists, even going as far as putting himself into The New York Trilogy.

Oracle Night is a fascinating read which explores the nature of fiction and the difficult process of creation. Like life, it doesn't have any neatly wrapped-up endings, and Auster instead leaves the reader to fill in the blanks.

* Faber & Faber, $49.95