🔗 Share this article

If a few authors experience an imperial period, where they reach the pinnacle time after time, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s ran through a run of four fat, gratifying books, from his 1978 breakthrough Garp to 1989’s Owen Meany. Those were expansive, humorous, big-hearted works, linking protagonists he refers to as “misfits” to societal topics from women's rights to termination.

Following A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been waning outcomes, aside from in page length. His most recent novel, 2022’s His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages long of themes Irving had examined more effectively in previous books (inability to speak, dwarfism, trans issues), with a lengthy screenplay in the middle to extend it – as if extra material were needed.

Therefore we look at a recent Irving with caution but still a faint spark of optimism, which shines brighter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a only four hundred thirty-two pages – “revisits the universe of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 book is one of Irving’s finest books, located mostly in an orphanage in St Cloud’s, Maine, run by Wilbur Larch and his protege Homer.

Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who previously gave such joy

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about termination and belonging with colour, wit and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a significant novel because it moved past the themes that were becoming annoying tics in his novels: the sport of wrestling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

This book starts in the fictional town of the Penacook area in the early 20th century, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in 14-year-old orphan Esther from the orphanage. We are a a number of decades ahead of the storyline of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch remains recognisable: still dependent on anesthetic, beloved by his caregivers, opening every speech with “In this place...” But his appearance in the book is restricted to these opening parts.

The couple fret about bringing up Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how might they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent discover her identity?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will become part of the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary group whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish communities from hostile actions” and which would eventually become the basis of the IDF.

Those are massive subjects to tackle, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is hardly about St Cloud's and Dr Larch, it’s even more disheartening that it’s likewise not about Esther. For motivations that must relate to narrative construction, Esther turns into a gestational carrier for a different of the couple's daughters, and bears to a male child, the boy, in 1941 – and the lion's share of this book is Jimmy’s narrative.

And here is where Irving’s fixations come roaring back, both typical and particular. Jimmy goes to – where else? – the city; there’s discussion of avoiding the military conscription through self-harm (Owen Meany); a dog with a symbolic designation (the dog's name, recall the earlier dog from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, sex workers, writers and male anatomy (Irving’s recurring).

The character is a duller character than Esther hinted to be, and the secondary players, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are flat also. There are several amusing scenes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a fight where a handful of ruffians get assaulted with a crutch and a air pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a nuanced novelist, but that is is not the difficulty. He has always restated his arguments, telegraphed story twists and allowed them to gather in the viewer's mind before taking them to resolution in lengthy, shocking, amusing moments. For instance, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to disappear: think of the tongue in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those losses reverberate through the story. In this novel, a central character suffers the loss of an limb – but we just discover thirty pages before the finish.

The protagonist reappears toward the end in the book, but merely with a eleventh-hour feeling of concluding. We do not learn the full story of her life in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a author who previously gave such joy. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading alongside this work – even now remains wonderfully, four decades later. So choose the earlier work instead: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but far as good.