🔗 Share this article

If some novelists enjoy an golden period, in which they achieve the heights consistently, then American author John Irving’s ran through a sequence of several long, gratifying books, from his 1978 success The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were expansive, humorous, big-hearted works, tying figures he refers to as “misfits” to societal topics from gender equality to reproductive rights.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning outcomes, aside from in word count. His most recent novel, 2022’s His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages of topics Irving had explored better in prior works (inability to speak, short stature, gender identity), with a 200-page film script in the center to extend it – as if extra material were needed.

Thus we come to a latest Irving with reservation but still a small glimmer of hope, which burns stronger when we discover that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages long – “goes back to the world of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 work is among Irving’s top-tier novels, set largely in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Wells.

The book is a letdown from a author who once gave such pleasure

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored termination and identity with vibrancy, comedy and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important book because it abandoned the subjects that were becoming annoying tics in his novels: wrestling, ursine creatures, the city of Vienna, prostitution.

The novel begins in the imaginary town of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where the Winslow couple take in young foundling the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a several generations before the action of Cider House, yet Dr Larch is still familiar: already addicted to anesthetic, beloved by his nurses, beginning every speech with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in Queen Esther is restricted to these initial scenes.

The Winslows are concerned about raising Esther properly: she’s Jewish, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish girl discover her identity?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be a member of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will join Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organisation whose “goal was to protect Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would subsequently establish the basis of the Israel's military.

Such are enormous topics to take on, but having brought in them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is hardly about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s even more disheartening that it’s additionally not really concerning the main character. For motivations that must relate to plot engineering, Esther turns into a gestational carrier for one more of the family's offspring, and delivers to a male child, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the majority of this book is his narrative.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy goes to – where else? – the Austrian capital; there’s mention of dodging the military conscription through self-harm (His Earlier Book); a dog with a meaningful name (Hard Rain, recall Sorrow from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, prostitutes, authors and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

He is a more mundane persona than the heroine promised to be, and the supporting figures, such as students the two students, and Jimmy’s teacher Eissler, are flat as well. There are a few amusing set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a couple of thugs get assaulted with a walking aid and a air pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a delicate novelist, but that is not the issue. He has repeatedly repeated his points, telegraphed plot developments and enabled them to accumulate in the viewer's mind before leading them to resolution in extended, jarring, entertaining moments. For case, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to be lost: recall the tongue in Garp, the hand part in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces echo through the narrative. In this novel, a major person loses an arm – but we only find out thirty pages the finish.

Esther comes back late in the story, but just with a eleventh-hour feeling of ending the story. We not once discover the entire narrative of her life in Palestine and Israel. The book is a failure from a novelist who once gave such joy. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that Cider House – upon rereading together with this work – even now remains wonderfully, four decades later. So read it in its place: it’s twice as long as Queen Esther, but far as great.