🔗 Share this article

If a few writers experience an imperial period, during which they hit the heights repeatedly, then U.S. author John Irving’s extended through a run of four substantial, gratifying books, from his late-seventies hit Garp to 1989’s Owen Meany. Those were expansive, humorous, warm novels, connecting figures he describes as “outsiders” to social issues from gender equality to reproductive rights.

After Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, aside from in page length. His last novel, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages of themes Irving had delved into better in earlier books (inability to speak, short stature, gender identity), with a two-hundred-page film script in the center to fill it out – as if padding were needed.

Thus we look at a new Irving with reservation but still a faint spark of expectation, which burns stronger when we learn that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages in length – “returns to the setting of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 novel is part of Irving’s top-tier works, taking place primarily in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer.

The book is a letdown from a writer who in the past gave such delight

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and identity with colour, wit and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important book because it moved past the topics that were turning into annoying habits in his books: grappling, wild bears, Austrian capital, sex work.

This book begins in the fictional community of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow adopt teenage ward the title character from the orphanage. We are a several generations ahead of the action of Cider House, yet the doctor stays identifiable: already addicted to the drug, adored by his nurses, starting every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in Queen Esther is restricted to these initial parts.

The couple are concerned about raising Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could they help a young Jewish girl find herself?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will join Haganah, the pro-Zionist armed force whose “goal was to protect Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would eventually establish the basis of the IDF.

Those are massive themes to take on, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s frustrating that Queen Esther is not really about St Cloud's and Dr Larch, it’s still more disheartening that it’s also not about the titular figure. For reasons that must involve plot engineering, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for a different of the Winslows’ daughters, and delivers to a male child, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the majority of this book is the boy's tale.

And at this point is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both common and distinct. Jimmy moves to – naturally – the city; there’s talk of evading the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a canine with a symbolic designation (Hard Rain, remember the earlier dog from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, authors and penises (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a more mundane character than Esther suggested to be, and the secondary figures, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s teacher the tutor, are underdeveloped also. There are some enjoyable scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a couple of ruffians get beaten with a walking aid and a tire pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a delicate novelist, but that is isn't the issue. He has always restated his points, foreshadowed narrative turns and allowed them to gather in the reader’s thoughts before taking them to completion in long, jarring, entertaining sequences. For instance, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to be lost: think of the speech organ in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces resonate through the narrative. In the book, a major figure loses an upper extremity – but we only discover 30 pages the finish.

Esther comes back toward the end in the novel, but only with a eleventh-hour sense of concluding. We do not discover the complete narrative of her life in the region. Queen Esther is a letdown from a author who once gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading together with this book – even now stands up beautifully, 40 years on. So choose the earlier work in its place: it’s twice as long as the new novel, but 12 times as good.