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100 Books in One Year #10: The Last Oracle by James Rollins

Cannonball Read / Brian Prisco

Book Reviews | October 1, 2008 | Comments (10)

James Rollins, not to be confused with the excellent Phillie, can be blamed on Dan Brown. When The Da Vinci Code came out, a whole slew of authors sort of came out of hiding in his wake, creating a series of semi-Indiana Jones-ish adventures, following the knights Templar, or seeking out grail memorabilia. The Spear of Destiny, the Holy Grail, the Shroud of Turin, the Apple of Discordia, basically anything that you hunted after when playing Wolfenstein. I read many of these, and they were spectacularly awful. Note to self, if it’s pimped by USA Today, it’s probably gonna suck a goat cock.

Well, Rollins was slightly better than most, because his group was called Sigma, and they were a top secret cabal of scientists who also had military training. You know, smart people who know how to use guns. Often, Rollins would pull a “Law & Order” when mixing his Kool-aid, take some semi-factual information or theory and use it to make his pulpy action. The stories were usually pretty entertaining, and involved the intrepid heroes of SIGMA battling against The Guild, their nefarious arch-rivals.

There’ve been like four SIGMA novels, and they’ve gotten progressively lamer. Well, The Last Oracle takes the cake. First of all, he completely abandons The Guild, except for an odiously bad attempt at a cliffhanger at the end of the book. Secondly, it’s as if he read a Discovery magazine article on autism got all excited, and just packed his novel full of the factoids. And while the source material does factor for some intriguing stuff, it doesn’t fit in his world of melodrama and cheesy action.

Rollins really overdoes it this time through, overdoing his usual overwrought sensationalism. He loves to write short paragraphs with what are supposed to be very deep thoughts but come off more like badly written suspense.

Then he writes a dunh-dunh-dunh.

What’s that? It’s a short sentence that’s supposed to pack a forceful wallop, but it’s really more like one of those moments in a bad television cop serial where someone makes a riveting statement and the music plays a dramatic swell. Gabrielle couldn’t have been sleeping with Bradley. Because he’s her son.

Or could she?

Dunh-dunh-dunh!

Rollins loads his books full of either those, or internal monologues that are shamefully leading. He’s assuming his audience is partially autistic themselves, and he keeps leading them by the nose just in case they can’t follow his typical fiction. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he was capped the write the novelization of the newest Indiana Jones atrocity. He’s been essentially attempting to do that his entire career, especially with his early non-SIGMA novels.

The Last Oracle proposes that the Oracle of Delphi was actually a series of autistic savants who suffered from gas fume hallucinations, and then escaped to India to propagate the Gypsy race. Hence their abilities to fortune tell. All of which is allegedly true. In the novel, a Russian task force has harvested this bloodline of incestuous psychic gypsy children in order to use their autistic savantism to foretell world events and cause a cataclysmic world destruction by utilizing the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. It’s SIGMA against this cabal, and it’s really weak storytelling of a really weak story. There’s zero drama, and there’s zero suspense. And this is even with the murder of a member of the SIGMA squad. It’s not even a payoff for anyone who’s been following the series. And the torrid love stories are getting really tepid and mediocre. It’s almost bad enough for me to relinquish my recommendation for people to read James Rollins. I seriously am not sure whether I’ll bother to continue the series anymore.

This review is part of the Cannonball Read series. You can read more about it, here.


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Comments

Actually, Rollins' Sigma series is the worst and laziest of his writing. Some of his earlier stuff, Amazonia, Subterranean, Deep Factor...are a lot of fun and definitely better then Dan Brown. The author in this genre you want to stay far, far away from is Matt Reilly! His plots read like Sci-Fi original scripts, his character development is nil, and his knowledge of reality is very tenuous.

Posted by: Adam C at October 1, 2008 8:28 AM

Sounds like he didn't know when to stop. Those Greek oracles.. were autistic! And... Then they became Gypsies! And the Russians use the gypsies to ... to foretell... erm... Chernobyl! Yeah.. *giggles to self as he punches the keys* Yeah... that's totally what they'd do.

Posted by: Optimus Rhyme at October 1, 2008 9:29 AM

". . . the Oracle of Delphi was actually a series of autistic savants who suffered from gas fume hallucinations . . ."

So like on Doctor Who? It was kinda freaky there. Does the book have a ginormous rock monster/alien too?

Posted by: nutmeag at October 1, 2008 9:34 AM

The Last Oracle proposes that the Oracle of Delphi was actually a series of autistic savants who suffered from gas fume hallucinations, and then escaped to India to propagate the Gypsy race.

Jesus Christ on a cracker, seriously?

My brain hurts at the stupid.

OK, so this one time, I bought a book called Atlantis. I never made it past the first page, because the author had some ancient Athenian referring to himeself as Greek. HE WASN'T GREEK! He was ATHENIAN. NO ONE in Greece referred to themselves as GREEK. I hate it when authors can't even get the simplest of facts straight, such as: Greece was a nation of city-states. So Athens wasn't just a city, it was a state too. So people who were from Athens were Athenian, not Greek! And people (well the male citizens anyway) from Sparta were Spartan, not Greek! And if you lumped a Spartan and an Athenian into the same group, they would team up just long enough to kick the shit out of you, before turning on each other!

OK, sorry. Rant over.

Posted by: Lizzieborden at October 1, 2008 12:24 PM

I could never tell the enemy soldiers from the potted plants when I played Wolfenstein 3D.

Posted by: Lucas at October 1, 2008 2:15 PM

The Last Oracle proposes that the Oracle of Delphi was actually a series of autistic savants who suffered from gas fume hallucinations, and then escaped to India to propagate the Gypsy race.

So what you're saying is that Michael Bay's production company has already optioned this, right?

Posted by: telesilla at October 2, 2008 3:47 AM

heh, Lizzieborden that reminds of the time I tried to read Sarah. I'd picked it up after reading Diamant's The Red Tent hoping to find another awesome story about women during the time of the Bible....and lord it sucked.
I couldn't make it past the 1st chapter because somehow, the male author goes into explicit detail about the use of a tampon (in ways that demonstrated he doesn't know much about 1. women and 2. tampons). Also, I'm willing to bet serious money that 'tampon' is not ancient Hebrew for linen bandage for the vag.

Posted by: Stella at October 2, 2008 1:09 PM

For me, and everyone else with a brain, all this grail-memorabilia hunting begins and ends with Foucault's Pendulum. It's like the Da Vinci Code, but written by a guy that knew how to write. I can't recommend it enough.

Posted by: Pen Dragon at October 3, 2008 5:41 AM

The first book in the Sigma Force Series that I ever read was Black Order, a truly unique and inspiring tale. During the middle I did find it a little hard to comprehend all the medical information discussed between the characters, but now Ive grown fond of this because it makes me believe that an intelligent person is behind the story. The Judas Strain is the next book in the Series, and while reading it, I experienced the same thrills.

When I first opened the Last Oracle, I was stoked again. The beautiful descriptions and sense of wonder had me glued to its pages. However, after diving into less than three quarters of the novel, I began to read it more like a critic than an enthused fan. There were too many repetitive phrases. *Shouts echoed* was one of the them, the use of the word oil* to describe things was constant, and I got this feeling that whoever edited this book was in a hurry to get it published. Thats what happens when the author is pushed towards a deadline; you dont get the same flawless narrative as when he is more focused on perfection than its publication. As for the overall storyline, I did find elements that were hugely entertaining, but to be quite honest, I was slightly dissapointed.

Posted by: Rebekah Baker at March 7, 2009 5:31 PM

The first book in the Sigma Force Series that I ever read was Black Order, a truly unique and inspiring tale. During the middle I did find it a little hard to comprehend all the medical information discussed between the characters, but now Ive grown fond of this because it makes me believe that an intelligent person is behind the story. The Judas Strain is the next book in the Series, and while reading it, I experienced the same thrills.

When I first opened the Last Oracle, I was stoked again. The beautiful descriptions and sense of wonder had me glued to its pages. However, after diving into less than three quarters of the novel, I began to read it more like a critic than an enthused fan. There were too many repetitive phrases. *Shouts echoed* was one of the them, the use of the word oil* to describe things was constant, and I got this feeling that whoever edited this book was in a hurry to get it published. Thats what happens when the author is pushed towards a deadline; you dont get the same flawless narrative as when he is more focused on perfection than its publication. As for the overall storyline, I did find elements that were hugely entertaining, but to be quite honest, I was slightly dissapointed.

Posted by: Rebekah Baker at March 7, 2009 5:31 PM