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.

Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/

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

I bought my battered, brown paged copy of “A Son of the Circus” second-hand at Blossoms Book House in Church Street, Bangalore. A previous owner had left an old used Bangladesh Biman (airways) boarding pass inside it. I used this souvenir of a journey, completed long ago, as a bookmark. By the time I finished this long book, this fragile strip of paper was a mere shadow of its former self.

The book begins with some pages of ‘Author’s Notes’. These start with the words: “This novel isn’t about India. I don’t know India. I was there once, for less than a month…” I strongly disagree with this. Irving may have only been in India for a short time, but he has certainly managed to write a beautifully detailed account of the parts of the country that feature in this lengthy novel. His eye for detail is amazing, as is his ability to fondly and sympathetically characterise the Indians who appear in the story.

On page 635 of my copy (published by Corgi in 1995), I read: “‘I’m going to tell you a little story about my mother,’ said Martin Mills. Somehow, Dr Daruwalla knew that the story wouldn’t be ‘little’. The missionary wasn’t a minimalist; he favoured description. In fact, Martin left out no detail…” This brief extract summarises Irving’s writing perfectly, and accounts for the great length of this novel.

Page after page, the author keeps on introducing new characters bits of information and frequently goes off at a tangent with seemingly irrelevant sidetracking. I found this a little disturbing at first, but soon realised that almost everything that Irving introduces eventually helps to drive the plot later on. So, if you feel that you are not sure where the book is heading when you have read about 300 pages, don’t despair!

I will not attempt to summarise the complicated plot, which is at least as complex as, and often even more enjoyable, than that of a long Bollywood film. The only thing that this novel lacks is the song and dance scenes that make Bollywood movies so much fun to watch. Needless to say, Dr Daruwalla, a Parsee physician, who resides most of the year in Toronto with Julia his Austrian wife, is the hero of this epic tale. Not only does he cure cripples and perform medical research during his regular visits to Bombay, but he also writes risqué film scripts for Bollywood films. His protégé, Inspector Dhar, is the hero of these films. Martin Mills, mentioned above, is Dhar’s identical twin. Trouble begins when Martin, a fanatical Jesuit, arrives in Bombay to take up missionary work. But Daruwalla is already facing difficulties on account of his films having upset a large number of people including Rahul, a malevolent transvestite who has recently married Mr Dogar, a fellow member of the Duckworth Club (which may be an alias for one of Bombay’s leading clubs such as the Willingdon Club). If you want to know more, then get started on the oddly compelling “A Son of The Circus”.

Although it has taken me ages to finish this book and the gold writing on its attractive green cover has worn away during many hours of holding it, this is an exciting book, an adventure, or maybe even a thriller, set in India. I recommend it highly.

I intend reading other books by Irving, but first let me tackle something briefer!

John Irving is the author of what is probably my very favorite book in the world, A Prayer for Owen Meany, for his use of language, his humor, and the incredible way he threads his story so that it it's both impossible to foresee the ending and impossible that it could end any other way. So when I discovered a book by him that i hadn't yet read in a used book store, I had both high and low expectations - that it would be awesome but nothing could be as good as APFOM. And mainly, I was right.

A Son of the Circus brought me directly into the world of dwarfs, and India, and the circus, and androgynous/gender-fluid characters (30 years before the current cultural revolution, ahead of its time and prescient in many ways.) Oh, and a murder mystery that it was ostensibly "about," but with many of John Irving's books, it's not really "about" any of that... but about what it means to be human, and to love, and to create, and to wrestle with God and imperfect family, friends, and society.

And while I loved the protagonist and his relationship with his erstwhile adopted son (and that son's frustrating but fascinating twin who nearly stole the show for me), I was repulsed by some descriptions of child molestation of one of the charactes. To be fair, I'm sure that was the point, but it made me hesitant to keep reading in part due to the moral ambiguity of the passages. Perhaps I am too conservative, but the passages for me detracted from the overall story, which was exquisitely crafted and laugh-out-loud funny in many places (and not generally in a highbrow manner!) But nearly a five/five, for the humor and craft and characters, and for a simple but profound ending that will stay with me for a long time.

After my serious disappointment with the (to me) inexplicable good reputation of _A Prayer for Owen Meany_, this (Irving's next novel) was a pleasant surprise. As I recall at the time, it was not greeted with good reviews. However, I found this (very, very long) novel the most creative effort Irving had offered in years (at least since _Cider House Rules_ if not _Garp_). Not only is it a major effort in imagination (Irving says in his Acknowledgements that he had never been to India at the time he wrote this novel that is set almost entirely in that country, but that he relied for details about Bombay and Gujarat on several Indian readers of his MS in progress whom he met in Toronto) but it is also an experiment in genre (a thriller, almost a mystery). As seems usual with Irving's work, you do have to be willing set aside his tone-deaf sexual and representational politics (a transsexual serial killer? Why? Purely for sensationalist effect, I suppose...). But if you are capable of that, the novel's narrative tension and richness of detail is consistently entertaining (for such a long book, I rarely found myself feeling impatient at pacing or lack of narrative focus). The main characters are pleasantly complex and (almost) true to life. The main conflict comes from working out how to deal with a dangerous and unpredictable person without doing harm to innocent bystanders. The political subtext of racism toward immigrants (found in the Canadian sections of the novel) mesh well with the postcolonial intent (kind of) of the text: the main premise Irving worked with was that the protagonist, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, should be a man who is at home in no country, always migrating from his birthplace (India) back and forth to his adopted home in Canada. Along the way, Irving makes some cogent satirical commentary about the film industry and other popular culture phenomena. I also appreciated a very weird, fever-dream influenced moment of almost Lovecraftian eldritch horror nearly halfway through the book (I admit a weakness for HPL and his weird fiction associates). I also appreciated the implications of what I presume was merely a narrative device (though one that opens up interesting critical possibilities): several of the characters are called by two different names throughout the text; at least one of these, John D./Inspector Dhar, seems to be intended as a means of subtle characterization.

Overall, I found this to be one of Irving's better efforts. I'm even keeping my copy to reread one day, something I don't usually do.

As always, John Irving takes the reader on an intense and varied journey through varied cultures and mysteries. I love his insights and parallel plots all going on at the same time; no time to be bored or distracted.