A Son of the Circus (Library Binding)

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.

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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...

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