There’s the fixer named the Coach, the most intriguing and wonderful character outside of Dando – I’d read an entire book about the Coach, but I won’t spoil any details about them here. There are two feds who clearly loathe each other but who have to work together to find the Oracle, because their boss says so. There’s the Protestant televangelist Hosiah Branson, who fulminates against the Oracle from his pulpit, only to find that one of the 108 predictions is about him. The pace never lets up, and Soule has managed to populate the book with interesting and strange characters – not many with depth, but at least with enough complexity to make them seem real on the page. The Oracle Year is nuts, and I mean that in a very good way. Eventually, those predictions lead to real-world violence and many preventable deaths, sending Will into an existential crisis and opening up questions of free will, the inevitability of history, and just who sent Will those predictions in the first place.
For reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand, however, Will can’t just stop being the Oracle, even when it’s clear that doing so is his best shot to save himself, Hamza, and Hamza’s pregnant wife Miko, both of whom become deeply involved in the Oracle’s undertakings. This endeavor leads to substantial and largely foreseeable consequences, not the least of which is that he’s attracted the attention of the FBI, religious leaders, and a few other folks who would like to know his secret or just generally shut him down. Will Dando is a more or less unemployed bassist who wakes up one morning with 108 oddly specific predictions about the future in his head, and when he writes them down, he realizes that the first few were accurate, so with the help of his friend Hamza, he dubs himself the Oracle, sets up a site (called the Site) to publish certain predictions, and sells a few others for a massive profit. It’s weird and improbable and incredibly compelling, with so much velocity to it that I could forgive its faults, and never could put the book down for long. It sat unpurchased on my wishlist for some time before I gave up and bought it myself, and then tore through the novel’s 400 pages in less than four days.
I’m not sure how I first heard about The Oracle Year, the first prose novel from graphic novelist Charles Soule, but I believe it was a positive review rather than a reader recommendation.
0 kommentar(er)
