Prayer for Owen Meany

Irving, John

ISBN 10: 0606162496 ISBN 13: 9780606162494

Publisher: Demco Media, 1999

Synopsis

While playing baseball in the summer of 1953, Owen Meany hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother, and he becomes convinced that he is an instrument of God

About this title

Review:

Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mum with a baseball and believes--correctly, it transpires--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish Dr Dolder, Owen's shrink, drunkenly driving his VW down the school's marble steps is a marvellous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose". When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't change the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history and God. --Tim Appelo

Review:

"I believe it to be a work of genius... because of its absolutely irrepressible flow of invention and suggestion, expressed in some of the most fascinating prose written in fiction today. Originality has distinguished all Mr Irving's books, but in A Prayer For Owen Meany it achieves a new pitch and a new profundity" (Independent)

"Marvellously funny... What better entertainment is there than a serious book which makes you laugh?" (Spectator)

"So extraordinary, so original, and so enriching" (The Washington Post)

"May justly join the classic American list" (Observer)

"A heartbreaking masterpiece of a novel... tremendously ambitious and fiendishly clever" (Dominic Holland Sunday Express)

About this edition

• Publisher: Demco Media
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0606162496
• ISBN 13: 9780606162494
• Binding: Library Binding