Lucky to be alive?

Oracle Night describes a nine-day episode in the life of a writer, Sidney Orr. Orr is recovering from a long illness after a sudden collapse resulted in critical head injuries. He has been lucky to escape with his life — or, to put it another way, he should be dead. Eight months after the accident Orr drifts around Brooklyn on daily recuperative walks, a shadow of his former self: he is light-headed, detached from the clamour of city life. One morning he buys a blue notebook and starts writing again, curiously absorbed. And then, as if by magic, his life begins to unravel. Certainties become uncertain, trust becomes mistrust, an ordered life turns to disorder, to panic and finally to tragedy.

But there are many more stories within this curious book. There is the story Orr’s friend John Trause tells about his brother-in-law and a cache of old photographs; the short story of John Trause’s which Orr loses in a packed subway train; the film treatment that Orr dashes off in the hope of a commission, and even a manuscript called Oracle Night, described as ‘a brief philosophical novel about predicting the future, a fable about time’. Most significantly there is the story Sidney Orr begins to write in the blue notebook. He invents a character, a literary agent named Nick Bowen, who is nearly killed by a chunk of falling masonry and decides he has been given another chance at life. Abandoning wife, job and home, he jumps on an aeroplane and flies from New York to Kansas City. Through a series of bizarre accidents he ends up locked in a dungeon with no possible means of getting out.

Sidney Orr was given the idea for this story by his friend John Trause.