A Son of the Circus

My favorite Irving book. I have a love/hate relationship with Irving's work. "Son" is a madhouse of a novel, even for Irving. The plot(s) are dizzyingly complicated; the characters as bizarre as always, but somehow believable. I loved the feeling for India in the book; and the humor--oh my! The scene in the cab made me laugh until I cried, thus waking up my husband, as I was reading in bed. If you can tolerate really, really weird situations, don't mind some mild but off-the-wall sexual references, and just want to read something completely different, this is a book for you.

DNF @ Page 355.

Yep, I'm giving up after investing so much time into this shaggy dog of a novel. I wanted to like it, really. Irving is one of my favorite authors and reading his stuff is always an unique experience. But this thing is ALL over the place: it doesn't know what it wants to be, or why. I can't keep up with the ever-expanding cast of characters nor can I find a reason to care about them. I don't know where the hell this thing is going, and I'm only halfway done. I just cannot keep going.

Still, Irving's prose is impeccable in places and I did like a couple of the characters — hence my 2 stars. Maybe I will finish this one day.

I buddy read this with my friend Edward. We will be tackling A Widow for a Year next. :)

This is probably Irving’s most ambitious and mature work, a masterpiece really. It is set in Bombay, India and contains multiple storylines, all dealing with surprising, and often grotesque, characters, situations, and practices. Like in many of Irving’s books, misfits play a central role. Incredibly multifarious writing but easy and informative to read. One suspects that Irving did a lot of research for this book. In general Irving is one of my absolutely favourite contemporary authors, a writer of great integrity. His books are always both profound and entertaining, and never disappoint!

I dropped this after the first 100 pages as I found it hard going getting into the life of circus dwarfs.

A couple of months later I picked it up again and WOW it really did take off for me.

A fascinating story and set of characters, generally based in India, but I found it a shocking story at times. I've read several books based in India and I am always taken aback at the poverty, dire living conditions, insanitary conditions and the lack of human respect for women. It is very difficult to understand their acceptance of sexual abuse of children.

Aside from the horrors it was a very good read.

I've always been a John Irving fan, but this one took me by surprise. It has a very slow start - I found myself struggling to get into it, thinking, "Why on earth would I care about an Indian circus and an Orthopedist's quest for dwarf blood?" (And yeah - it's exactly as weird as it sounds, at least at first.) I almost gave it up. Suddenly, though, after I pushed through the first two chapters, the dozens of characters started to gain their own identities, and all of a sudden, n  bang!n, I was in an Irving novel.

This book, surprisingly (at least to me), had the almost certainly unintended (and definitely unanticipated) effect of making me want to learn more about India. Which is weird, since, as the book makes clear time and time again, it's not really about India. It's part detective mystery, part rumination on global racial relations, part unapologetic schmaltz, funny as hell and surprisingly heartbreaking (it has a sneaky habit, like more than one of Irving's books, of catching you off guard. You'd think I'd be ready for him by now, but it seems like I never am!). This novel is a lot like A Prayer for Owen Meany in that its last chapters, wherein everything starts getting wrapped up, have a sense of mourning about them, at least in a general "time marches on" kind of sense that's sort of hard to pin down.

I really love this book. It's kind of a slog at 682 pages, but I think I read it every single night for two weeks. Highly, highly recommended.

I read this book by accident and discovered how rich a a story can be.

The son of the circus from the title is Doctor Farokh Daruwalla, a somewhat surprising choice as main character that has to carry on his shoulders such a hefty narrative. At first glance he is a placid little man, of a rather short stature and rotund girth, neat and fussy but in general shy and insecure. As I followed his interior monologues for page after page I have come to compare him to a still pond that hides great depths beneath the calm surface.

as a Parsi and a Christian, a Bombayite and a Torontonian, an orthopedic surgeon and a dwarf-blood collector, Dr Daruwalla could never have been satisfied by just one club.

The choice of focus on this confused, conflicted personage was intentional on the part of the author, who probably has little use for clear cut, opinionated, inflexible heroes. And Dr. Daruwalla is a true hero of the ordinary kind (I'm thinking Ikiru ), trying to do good even when he is not sure of the right path: doing unpaid work in children hospitals, researching a cure for genetical dwarfism, rescuing street urchins, raising other people's abandoned offspring, being a good husband and father, volunteering to help the terminally ill. His insecuritites and his unquenchable curiosity are in fact the motors that constantly push him forward, together with a rampant imagination and ingrained sense of justice.

The doctor was no more the incarnation of a god than he was a writer; he was, like most men, principally a dreamer.

Bored by the routine of a successful professional and family life, he seeks to discharge his creative energies through writing, more specifically Bollywood film scripts. His shyness and self-deprecation will make him act from the shadows, renouncing the limelight for the quiet satisfaction of the secret observer of human folly. The results are more often than not absolutely hilarious, and I would rate "A Son of the Circus" as one of the best comedies I've read this year. For sure, the humor is often bitter and sarcastic, aimed equally at the outside world and at his own person:

Farrokh had conceived Inspector Dhar in the spirit of satire — of quality satire. Why were there so many easily offended people? Why had they reacted to Inspector Dhar so humorlessly? Had they no appreciation for comedy? Only now, when he was almost 60, did it occur to Farrokh that he was his father's son in this respect: he'd uncovered a natural talent for pissing people off.

or,
Except when eating, Farrokh embraced procrastination as one greets an unexpected virtue.

Inspector Dhar is the doctor's most famous creation, a tough Bombay policeman moulded as the exact opposite of the creator's personality: athletic and quick witted, a smooth operator when it comes to the ladies and an acerbic critic of the sins of his peers. He is played in the movies by a friend of the doctor, John D., a younger man whose backstory and present tribulations are linked intimately to the main plot.

The main plot is structured similarly to one of the doctor scripts: a grotesque murder in the opening chapter, a chase after a serial killer targetting prostitutes in the Bombay red lights district, a pair of twins separated at birth, a wily police inspector and his emotionally unstable wife, beggars, dwarves, overbearing butlers, a 20 years old unsolved case, and so on. The relation between the plot and the movie scripts is also deliberate, illustrating the tendency of Dr. Daruwalla to retreat into his imaginary world in times of stress, where he uses the godlike powers of auhtorship in order to reshape events into a more palatable version of reality, one that makes sense and where lessons can be learned, and happy endings are still a possibility.

Damn other people's messes! Dr Daruwalla was muttering aloud. He was a surgeon; as such, he was an extremely neat and tidy man. The sheer sloppiness of human relationships appalled him, especially those relationships to which he felt he'd brought a special responsibility and care. Brother-sister, brother-brother, child-parent, parent-child. What was the matter with human beings, that they made such a shambles out of these basic relationships?

As a character study, the novel succeeds spectacularly in presenting not only the many facets of Dr. Daruwalla, but of all the numerous players gravitating around his stocky frame. The narrative jumps effortlessly to these other points of view, only to return to the anchor point of Farokh. The actual timeline of the events cover less than two weeks of the doctor's visit to Bombay, helping to give the story a sense of unity and simmetry, but the pacing is leisurely with lengthy flashbacks within flashbacks going back decades to Farokh's early childhood fascination with the circus, his studies and courtship in Austria, a first contact with an American film crew in Bombay, his medical career in Toronto, his periodical returns to India, his success as a scriptwriter. The wealth of details is often overwhelming (Irving is aware of the fact, and turns it into a self-referencing joke: The missionary wasn't a minimalist; he favored description. ), but my patience was rewarded when all the trivia turned out to have a role to play in the script after all.

No one who's still trying to "find himself" at thirty-nine is very reliable. exclaims Dr. Daruwalla at one point in the story, apparently unaware that he himself is still searching for his identity at the age of 60. His search leads him to religion, to scientific studies, to the already mentioned literary career. Most of all his questions relate to his cultural and spiritual heritage:

In Toronto, Farrokh was an unassimilated Canadian – and an Indian who avoided the Indian community. In Bombay, the doctor was constantly confronted with how little he knew India – and how unlike an Indian he thought himself to be.

At this level, the books scans as an overlong study of alienation, with Farrokh reiterating a favorite phrase of his father: "An immigrant remains an immigrant all his life." Rejected by extremists in his adopted land, viewed with suspicion in India because of his Western mannerisms and sensibilities, his plight will find resonance in readers like me, who are bilingual and immersed in a foreign culture or two on a daily basis, finding few chances to relate and discuss it with my immediate friends and family. The theme of alienation is not limited to Farrokh Daruwalla, it touches every secondary character in one form or another, be they a Jesuit missionary, a redneck girl on the run, a transexual boy/girl with long held grudges, an actor with a double life, a butler who feels superior to his patrons, or a dwarf who can no longer perform in the circus.

In our hearts, there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they're foreigners – even in their native lands.

Dr. Daruwalla seeks refuge in familiar places : his exclusivist and rigidly traditional club, his religious epiphany, the love for his wife, literature. As with his scriptwriting, the results are hilarious, especially the story of his conversion to Catholicism or the discovery of the beneficial effects of purple prose during a second honeymoon (Note to self: check out James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime). Other literary references deal with religious identity, mostly in the books of Graham Greene, quoted repeatedly in the text and in the polemic between the doctor and the missionary.

I'm not an expert on the work of John Irving, beside Cider House Rules, but it appears social issues and a general quality of mercy towards his characters are a constant feature of his novels. Intransigence, homosexuality, the exploitation of children, poverty, drug abuse, alcoholism, religious fervor are among the hot button issues touched upon in the text. The intensity of emotions and the subtlety of the observations make me recommend the book wholeheartedly, but my own struggles with the text (I spent two months on it instead of the usual 7-10 days) stop me short of a full endorsement. I experienced a lack of urgency, a self-indulgent streak for getting lost in minute details and painful moral considerations that illustrate well the personality of Farrokh, but stopped me from reading more than a few pages at a time.

On another personal note, a comparison to my other sprawling Indian saga I've read this year (The Midnight Children) is inevitable. Salman Rushdie and John Irving have little in common stylistically and the personalities of the main protagonists could not be more divergent (one a riotous, volcanic extrovert, subversive and irreverent in language and deed, the other a laidback, introspective, meticulous and detached observer) yet I found both accounts true to human nature with their differences more important than their similarities in revealing an Indian culture too big and too wild to fit into a rigid framework.

I would like to close with some praises for the author's use of metaphor and catchphrases (oneliners) reiterated like a song refrain, many dealing with the circus world, even if the actual story only visits the circus in a short episode. For Farrokh Daruwalla though, the circus comes to represent the whole meaning of life, from the childhood exuberance of miracles possible, to the ever present danger ("falling into the net") and constant struggle for survival, and ultimately to the revelation of the whole grotesque absurdity of reality. Since the show must go on, all we can ultimately do is relax and enjoy the ride.

[edit 2016 : spelling]

Returning for a second novel by John Irving, I was transported to India, where the culture shock was massive and the storytelling proved to be quite non-linear. All that being said, with patience and perseverance, I made it through this unique piece of writing and even feel that I enjoyed it. The circus is preparing for its next performance and, as always, there is something going on that is of interest. In India, the use of Achondroplastic dwarfs is quite common in the circus, allowing for some of the tricks to seem even more death-defying. However, it is not that which interests Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla. Instead, he prefers to locate a gene that might identify this dwarfism, trying to do so every time he returns home to Toronto. That Dr. Daruwalla is an orthopaedic surgeon seems of little concern to him or anyone else, though his medical specialty is also relevant at times. As Dr. Daruwalla is unable to locate a dwarf genetic marker, he is back for more blood testing, in hopes of being lucky this one time. While dining with a friend at the private club, Dr. Daruwalla is alerted to a murder on the golf course, where someone has been struck by a club. Unable to decipher what has gone on, Dr. Daruwalla uses some of his intuition to deduce what could have happened. Little known to anyone, Dr. Daruwalla is the author of a series of screenplays about an Inspector Dhar, one of India’s most renowned film stars. This is truly the central premise of the book—finding out who murdered the club member on the ninth green—but there is so much backstory to decipher about a handful of characters and how their interactions over the span of forty years has led to this point. Irving weaves many highly intricate storylines together, most in India, to tell of how the elder Dr. Daruwalla taught his son, Farrokh, some of the ins and outs of orthopaedics and what a chance filming of a horrible movie in India did for the community, as well as how it enriched the next generation of people who come to play their part in this book. From child prostitutes to accepted (and praised) alternative lifestyles, all of these flavourings of India come together to create this massive tome that has quite the story to tell, as long as the reader is patient and attentive in equal measure. Well-crafted, but not for all readers, I found this to be yet another winner by John Irving. Recommended for the type of reader who can handle tangential writing, as well as those who love all things Indian.

I will be the first to admit that this book will not be for everyone. I read this book and found myself stuck within the story, but could tell that had this been my first Irving, I likely would have pulled the plug. It does not read in a linear fashion in the least, leaping from different timelines in order to fill in many of the cracks and offer backstories for the characters. Irving has so many characters that I chose not to hone in on one to be labelled protagonist. Rather, he fills the chapters with a wonderfully complex and non-linear story that has more tangents than a high school math class. It is by focussing on these stories as central building blocks to the larger narrative that the reader can see how things piece themselves together. I found myself able to devour large chunks of the story at once, if only to better comprehend how things fit together. Irving’s style of detailed discussions will surely cause some readers to feel drowned while others will relish the experience. With long chapters that are broken into small vignettes, the reader can digest Irving’s massive undertaking in more manageable bites. With a unique story and many strong characters, this piece by John Irving is not to be missed by those who have the patience and fortitude.

Kudos, Mr. Irving, for this wonderful piece that challenged me from the start and throughout.

This book serves to fulfil the March 2020 requirement of the Mind the Bookshelf Gap reading group.

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A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...