The novel’s story has two basic areas of focus: 1) immigrant experience; 2) varieties of human sexuality and the personal and communal responses thereto. The immigrant experience theme is the weaker of the two. While the main character has some uncomfortable experiences as an Asian Indian who has become a Canadian citizen, he mostly leads a comfortable life in Toronto, is a highly rated surgeon, and has married a European woman with whom he has a very good marriage. And he is respected during his frequent lengthy visits to India. The sexuality theme is more substantively treated through the various vignettes and characters. There is a third minor theme about religion which doesn’t break any new ground.

The book has a 40+ page epilogue which, except for a few pages, really dilutes the book.

I usually love John Irving, but this one I was surprised I finished - I probably should have put it down at some point, as I just couldn't find a character I cared enough about to really be interested in finding out what happened to them.

John Irving is a prolific writer. If you haven’t heard of him, you’ve probably seen a movie made from one of his books (The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire). One of my favorite books of all time is his novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany (part of which was made into the movie Simon Birch).

In A Son of the Circus, John Irving has nested the plot (much like the movie Inception did with dreams) in several-level-deep flashbacks that can take the reader on long detours through memories involving one character and then another who may have their own memories, finally winding back up in the present day. It sounds confusing, but it works. To the extent that you can say any of John Irving’s novels are about anything (they are all about the same thing – the human experience) this one is about gender, sexuality (hetero-, homo-, and trans-sexuality), religion, and immigration. (It’s funny how all of these themes are still relevant almost 30 years after this book was written!) The main character is an Indian-born doctor who was raised in Europe, but settled in Toronto, Canada. “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives,” the main character’s father told him at a young age. He feels like an outsider wherever he goes. The book also features dwarves who work in an Indian Circus and even a large dildo used to hide smuggled drugs and cash. Vintage Irving!

Irving’s style is dense in details and hyper realistic (but not hard to read). For instance, his characters don’t just do things to advance the plot, they do them while suffering from a sore back or bad gas. He usually features characters with some form of physical disability and, often, a wild animal makes an appearance. Often, his main character is a writer of some sort (in this one a part-time screenwriter) which I love because, by way of this device, Irving provides insight into his own writing process. I’d love to learn to write a novel like John Irving!

This book was a little hard to get into and the copy I read had tiny type which messes with my old eyes, but once I got my stride, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I live in an area that has experienced a lot of immigration in the last 10-20 years, mostly from China and India, and I admit I get frustrated at the changes that have overtaken my home town. While I still rage when sitting in soul-destroying traffic, idling behind an immigrant driver who can’t figure out how to turn off his windshield wipers, and puzzle over store signs written entirely in Chinese characters, reading this book has given me some empathy for the immigrant experience. And, in the end, empathy is good for all of us.

I especially found a quote from the last few pages of the book moving, as the main character reflects on his own life.

“One day, how would Dr. Daruwalla be remembered? As a good doctor, of course; as a good husband, a good father – a good man by all counts, though not a great writer….Sometimes he seemed a little tired – chiefly in the area of his eyes – or else there was something faraway about his thoughts, which, for the most part, he kept to himself. No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind. Possibly what passed for his tiredness was nothing more than the cost of his considerable imagination, which had never found the outlet that it sought.”

This must be the only John Irving book I hadn´t read before; I remember having read the first 40?50?60? pages once, but then, I put it aside...until now. 632 pages and indeed quite hard to get into IMHO, but once you´re in the story, it´s a joy to read. Certainly not as brilliant (also IMHO) as The World According to Garp or A Prayer for Owen Meany (my favourite books of his), but nevertheless well written and a well constructed storyline moreover : I was wondering how the epilogue could end without that feeling of "letting pass the years in a few lines" which I normally detest, and JI pulled it off!

O. M. G.

I seriously thought this book was NEVER going to end.

And somewhere around page 500 I really needed it to end...yet I still had some 200 pages to go.

When I hit page 645 (and a very natural ending to the novel) and then turned the page only to be confronted with a 50 page EPILOGUE I thought I was going to die.

Traditionally I have enjoyed the John Irving I've read. He's thick reading but also rich. And I don't typically shy away from long books.

However, in this particular novel there just wasn't enough of...well...anything to warrant the length, the thickness, the tiny type, the time commitment, the ANYTHING. I was too far in before I realized we really weren't going anywhere to stop, so I had to finish, and finishing wasn't fun. It was simply necessary.

So now I'm done.

There were three passages in the book that made me laugh out loud. Of course, I can't find any of them to share because they are BURIED in the rest of the book. The themes Irving seemed to be toying with were ultimately heavy-handed while simulateously not terribly well explored. I felt beaten with the themes, not engaged by them. One of the characters is supposed to hinge on the idea of "not a real woman" but - as a woman reading it - I felt Irving wasn't well versed enough IN women to actually tackle that topic. In fact, I felt like I was being called a collection of quirks and behaviors - that women were all ONE sort of thing and then that was further narrowed by the filter of Irving's own not understanding women-ness. I found myself feeling sour about it a lot throughout the 700 page piece.

Yeah. I just didn't like it. At all. I can't believe I stuck it out for the whole thing. There's weeks of my life I can't get back.

I've read ten of Irving's novels and this is the first one which I struggled to read. High expectations probably got in the way. I look forward to anything Irving writes and this was far from his best. It does have many features I've come to expect from an Irving novel. There's a doctor, a writer, a priest, an absent parent, fallen women, prostitutes, an Austrian connection, animals, contradictions, deformities, homosexuals, sex, Iowa, The University of Iowa, religion, reading, ruminating, and lots of imagery. Perhaps the most glaring omission is wrestling, but there's lots of acrobats in the circus so maybe wrestling wasn't needed. The other thing missing is New England but there's some minimal action in Boston.

What sets this novel off from the rest of Irving's work is its location – India. While the main character claims to live in Toronto only a few pages of this 633-page tome are set in Canada. India is both the location and a character. In the forward Irving says he's only spent a month in India. Yet he writes like someone who is thoroughly familiar with the place. If he's off base I would never know. He sounds totally accurate in his description of the caste system, living conditions, religions, Gods, types of people, media, police, medical conditions, Bollywood obsession, etc.

A major aspect of this book is the circus. Irving portrays the circus as a safer place for kids than the mean streets on which they beg for their daily existence. He decides to rescue a boy and a girl by placing them with a circus which overlooks the basic problem, their total lack of talent and experience. There's a basic agreement. The circus will take these two on as long as they accept the rules and all the training they will need to be productive for the circus. One immediately opts out, she never really wanted this anyway. The boy buys in to the arrangement but falls victim to his desire to sky-walk and overcome the limp from his foot having been stepped on long ago by an elephant. He falls to his death. So much for being a safer place.

Like most circuses there are dwarfs. The doctor believes by drawing the blood of the many dwarfs in the circus he may be able to locate a genetic marker which will predict the likelihood of a couple's offspring being a dwarf. The dwarf we follow through the book never permits his own blood being drawn but helps the doctor convince others to have their blood drawn. This independent dwarf has cars modified so he can drive them as taxis with hand controls. He and his wife wind up helping the Doctor throughout the story.

A surprising subplot is a murder mystery. We actually know who the murderer is early on so Iriving has to keep dropping new hints to keep this viable. One twist is that the murderer in the past twenty years has had a sex change operation so he's now a she. Interesting but this is really stretching credulity.

A more interesting subplot is the doctor's other side. He turns out to be a screenwriter of a series of movies starring his adopted son as a Detective that everyone loathes. Being loathed runs in the family. The Doctor's father was a famous surgeon and a staunch atheist with a propensity to challenge everyone. He made a slew of enemies. The father was assassinated.

Normally an Irving novel has at least a little eroticism. This one does but there's a twist. Instead of Irving composing his own erotic passages Irving has the Doctor and his wife go on a second honeymoon. It's low-key, they take their kids along. The Doctor discovers that the book his wife has brought along is a classic piece of 1960s erotica by a real author, James Slater. They decide to read passages from "A Sport and a Pastime" to each other with the desired effect. Seems like Irving's opted for erotica by proxy. It does virtually nothing to advance the plot but proves to be an interesting interruption.

Reread this and by the end I wished I hadn't. There is a great story in this book but halfway through Irving abandons it for personal politics and exploring issues such as homosexuality and aids. These issues had nothing to do with the story and so felt forced.
2 chapters before the end the main problem of the novel resolves itself leaving Irving two final chapters for wrapping up loose ends and believe it of not character development.
An internal problem was given to the main character in the first chapter and then abandoned. At the end, Irving seems to have realized this and then tried to cram a novel's worth of struggles into about 20 pages.
I have lowered my rating from 5 to 3 stars.

Fem stjerner bare for å illustrere at dette er min all-time Irving-favoritt.

Couldn't finish this one. Just not my cup of tea.

Good/decent but not great. Long read. Absolutely hilarious in parts but the story dragged in large areas. I didn’t totally connect with it. Not one of John Irving’s best but I would still slightly recommend it.

Wat schrijft Irving bloemrijk! Het verhaal zit goed in elkaar; verschillende personages worden uitvoerig beschreven en alle verhalen komen uiteindelijk bij elkaar. Het klopt helemaal! Heerlijk boek om te lezen!

John Irving continues to be one of my very favorite authors. This book is a delight! It’s filled with the typical oddities, humor, dysfunctional relationships, faith, and a bevy of social issues that include sexual orientation, gender, racism, class, and a serial killer - just to name a few. With his brillant giftedness, Irving weaves a story that is timeless and as relevant today as when it was written nearly 30 years ago. Before the final page, each character becomes memorable and, more often than not, beloved as well. I listened to this as an audio book and the reader did an excellent job. I also have the hardback version that I look forward to reading and savoring in print.