Before this nameless grandfather’s violent end, the secret of the cards was passed down to his daughters, Cassandra and Yrsyla Hume. The sisters, both of whom went on to master what they simply called “the Game,” used their father’s discovery to opposite ends. Yrsyla, the elder, became embroiled in Welsh separatist politics, while Cassandra, the more practical of the two, made a nice little pile as a gambler, using each hand she played to predict its own outcome. Cassandra eventually bought herself a ranch in Australia, and bore her illiterate, Adonis-like foreman a series of sons; after the disaster of the Great War and the collapse of the Cymru Fydd movement, Yrsyla disappeared without a trace.
The Excuse opens grandiosely, in Australia’s Gibson Desert. Ozymandias, Cassandra’s youngest son, is coming into his maturity, surrounded by half-witted prospectors and drunken Aborigines and missionaries who regard all forms of recreation — even waltzing — as abominations in the sight of God. His parents are dead, but Ozymandias is carefully looked after by two elder brothers, Ralph and Gawain, neither of whom have inherited their mother’s gift. It’s assumed, given his talent, that he’ll take up the family mantle; Ozymandias, however, has ideas of his own. As he grows toward adulthood, he develops a passion for the ranching life: he dreams of moving deeper into sheep country, where the range is still free, and of making his name as a breeder. But the gift of clairvoyance, he soon discovers, has one potentially lethal catch. Once given, it has to be used.
Ozymandias remains at home as long as he can stand to, dutifully reading the cards every evening for his brothers, though his disenchantment waxes by the day. The allure of the deck for them, he discovers, has nothing to do with the future at all, and still less with the world of the present: at some unknown point the Game has been perverted, turned inward, become less an exploration of things to come than a means of embalming the past. It has become, very literally, an excuse: a way of retreating from life, of taking shelter — in Ozymandias’s own words—“in some eldritch, sepia-tinted other-when.”
Orson wrote these opening chapters in a fever, drunk on the sheer impertinence of his argument, and his mania is clear both in the speed of the narrative and in the bubbling molasses of his prose. The climactic scene of book I, in which Ozymandias finally has it out with his brothers, reads less like a confrontation than like some kind of meshuggana manifesto:
“You mean to abandon us, then?” Gawain demanded, his tawny eyes flashing like vitreous coals.
“I mean to raise livestock,” said Ozymandias. “Goats at first, and then sheep.”
“It amounts to the same,” snarled his brother.
Ralph took in a breath to speak, but the expression on Gawain’s visage — and on Ozymandias’s own — made the skin of his nape start to prickle. “What would we become without the Game, Ozymandias?” he simpered. “The Game is our birthright. Without it — why, without it, we’d stop being Humes!”
“Without it,” Gawain said darkly, “the future might as well not come at all.”
“You’ve been bamboozled!!” Ozymandias ejaculated, holding the Excuse aloft. “And the tragedy of it, brothers, is that you’ve bamboozled yourselves. If you’d ever truly regarded this card — regarded it, I mean to say, and SEEN it — you’d have noted that the image is that of a Möbius coil, with no beginning and no end.”
“A Möbius which?”
“Time itself is no different,” Ozymandias proclaimed. “It ends where it begins. Why have we been able to stare into the future all these years, over all these proud, farsighted generations, but never become masters of our fate?” The orbs of his amethyst eyes, Welsh to the very core, revolved from Ralph to Gawain, then back again. “The answer is hideously simple. We’ve created a closed system, repetitive and stagnant, like the circuit represented on this card. We’ve turned the future into the past, dear brothers, simply by attempting to arrest it. There’s no escape from the Game — no solution, no respite, no hope — but to STOP PLAYING.”
After a lively debate, then a second grand speech, then a scuffle involving (I blush to report) a boomerang and a didgeridoo, Ozymandias vows never to consult the cards again, not ever, and strikes out into the night to seek his fortune. The book now metamorphoses into a survivalist bildungsroman, with the Aborigines alternately scaring the hell out of Ozymandias and treating him for dysentery. The temptations are great, as he works his way west, to make use of the cards; but he holds firm. He crosses the country, buys a farm, loses it, then somehow finds himself in Sydney, a destitute failure, languishing in a dingy furnished room. Throughout all these trials the deck has remained in his satchel, untouched and pristine. One evening, however, he takes it out of its tooled leather slipcase — a parting gift from his mother — and lays the cards out in a crescent on the floor.
Here the narrative morphs again, veering from bildungsroman toward something murkier, and it isn’t hard to figure out the reason. My father had arrived — after nearly three hundred pages — at the present instant of his own duration. Until then, his novel had been a work of history, however camouflaged; henceforth, it would be a prophecy.
The scene with the cards is cut short without warning, displaced by a sequence of drab, blurry flashbacks that serve no discernible purpose. I can feel Orson floundering at this point, Mrs. Haven, and stalling for time. We get Ozymandias as a toddler, dressed as Saint Augustine for a local pageant; we get Ozymandias’s first love affair, with Helen, an Aboriginal girl (the opposite of Ewa Ruszczyk in every detail); we get Ozymandias attacked by a dingo. When we finally return — somewhat the worse for wear — to that furnished room in Sydney, Ozymandias is still staring at the cards, which are lying facedown on the corkwood floor. He stays put for two-thirds of a page, sweating and running his tongue along his teeth, like a suicide struggling to work up his nerve. Then he takes the nearest card and flips it over.
* * *
Countless critics have tried, in the three decades since, to account for the popularity The Excuse enjoyed in Aquarian-era America, in spite of its blundering plotline, its junior high symbolism, and a style that makes Arthur C. Clarke look like Arthur Miller. None have come anywhere close to succeeding, but all agree that the novel’s last section, which is entirely taken up by Ozymandias’s psychedelic vision of the future, must somehow be to blame. Such a degree of critical consensus (as any connoisseur of book reviews will tell you) is the rarest and most delicate of flowers; but in Orson’s case the critics had their reasons. For one thing, the “Revelations” section — as it’s come to be known — has a radically different tone than the rest of the book, as if the author were taking dictation; and for another thing, Mrs. Haven, a number of its predictions have come true.
In spite of their almost incidental presence in his novels — usually as hastily sketched backdrops to scenes of cybernetic debauchery — my father’s prognostications of the not-too-distant future emerged, even during his lifetime, as the engine-in-chief of his fame. The time-travel allegation — the time travel insinuation, better said — had been leveled against my family before, to explain the Timekeeper’s disappearing act at Äschenwald; but the case against Orson Card Tolliver, especially since the invention of Global Positioning Systems and Viagra and the European Union (all of which he predicted), proved harder to sweep under the rug. The evidence, after all, is plain for anyone with a library card (or access to the World Wide Web — which Orson also saw coming) to judge for themselves. It changed my father from a figurative “cult novelist” into a literal one, an actor on the klieg-lit stage of history, no matter how furiously he lobbied to prevent it.