A Son of the Circus

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A splendid read - Rated
Being an Asian doctor in Britain, I can fully empathise with John Irving's insightful portrayal of Dr Farokh Daruwalla, a man caught between two cultures but belonging to neither. This book is so well written that it is surprising to learn that the author has never visited the Indian subcontinent. He has managed to capture the essence of that unique part of the world and its people in a moving, humorous, uplifting and, at times, thrilling, story. Once you start reading it you will not want it to end.

John Irving's Masterpiece - Rated
The forward of the book makes certain mention that John Irving was only in India for about a month. The book was written like he was a typical Bombayite, and all of us from that area applaud him for the book. The storyline was, John Irving style, entertaining and outrageous, however, his research on the styles and the idiocyncracies of the Parsis was spot on. So much so, that I could not believe a man who had spent such a short time in a country could unlock its soul.

Well done, John Irving, in my eyes you are one of the best authors today!

Chaos theory - Rated
John Irving's leitmotifs make for a curious collection. Wrestling; veneral disease; bombs; car and other freak accidents. Vienna; bears; sex-change operations; dwarves. Prostitutes; New England; precarious marriages and necessary infidelities.

When a critical mass of these Irving fetishes appears within a few pages, one can nearly hear the slow-motion crack of a bat nailing a baseball way, way out into the stands.

One of the most interesting features of his work is the convoluted logic which allows each of these themes to be worked into his lunatic subplots. Irving has the wonderful sadism of the best story-tellers, dragging out a chain of events over pages and pages.

"A Son of the circus" is the first Irving novel to make use of the wider world (i.e. not Vienna or New England). Irving sets down the massive machinery of his unsummarizable plots in India. India is a fitting world for him, with all its hugeness, sectarian chaos and multi-everything diversity.

Tom Wolfe has sharply criticized Irving for returning with a mere topography of India, and not a journalistic dissertation. This criticism, while not entirely unfair, is surely irrelevant to Irving's purposes. He has no pretence about being another Joseph Conrad or Ryszard Kapuscinski. Why compete with Salman Rushdie as India's novelist when Irving can bring his own mad vision to an unfamiliar nation?

"A son of the circus" involves a large number of typically bizarre components. An exhibitionist aristocrat named Lady Duckworth after whom Bombay's most prestigous social club is named. A Bombay-born, North Americanized orthopedist who adopts a beautiful boy for whom he writes movies scripts. A serial killing man-turned-woman who draw winking elephants on the stomachs of her victims. In such company, drug-smuggling hippies and a circus full of dwarves are nearly banal.

The chapter headings (such as "The Doctor Dwells on Lady Duckworth's Breasts", or "A Misunderstanding at the Urinal") are surely among the most wonderfully berserk in modern literature.

Irving's character studies are a masterful blend of punning names, verbal tics, and physical features rendered as Homeric epithets. According to the whims of his plots, Irving can suddenly inject a previously flat character with detailed history and motivation.

The concentration on form required of a novel which swalls the structure of a murder mystery whole results in a certain diminishment of emotional energy. While this cast of characters can make you laugh hysterically, unusually for Irving, it can't make you cry. Peerless in his mastery of the comedic epic, second-rate Irving is still first-rate American literature.

... ambitious, difficult, utterly brilliant. - Rated
'A son of the circus' is undoubtably Irving's most ambitious novel to date - and he succeeds brilliantly. It is a thrilling, highly complex epic about identity, history, East and West, mixed with sex, murder and subversive humour only the way Irving can.

Having read almost all of Irving's books, I would say this is one of his best novels too. But it is a difficult read. In a way, it is very non-Irving. Normally, Irving's storytelling is 'easy', always keeping the reader in mind, making sure he/she can follow, taking you by the hand. 'A son of the circus' feels like a culture shock, leaving you bewildered in its wide range of emotions, descriptions, themes, details and storylines. It starts slowly, includes long flasbacks and has many different fully developed characters.

Yet, once you're familiar with its universe, it opens up, does not let you go and fluently leads you to the finale, grand in its simplicity and honesty.

It is a must-read that can be easily compared to the best work of Umberto Eco or Salman Rushdie.

So here is what to do: Try 'The Fourth Hand' or 'A prayer for Owen Meany", become an Irving fan and then read 'A son of the circus'. You'll see...

Slow to Start, but a real cracker - Rated
It took me four attempts to get past the first hundred pages of this book and after that I was hooked. I love John Irving's earlier books, "Hotel New Hampstead" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany" are outstanding, but felt he lost the plot somewhere in the middle of his writing career. This seems like a return to form to me. Finally we get away from the twin themes of wrestling and bears, which have worn so thin with time. Now we get murders, religious sects, midgets and foreign climes and more humour than is usual with Irving. There is still blackness to this work, but with a harder edge, not that gut wrenching melancholy that informs so many of his other works. My recommendation would be to persevere with this. It was an excellent read.