A Prayer For Owen Meany (Signed First Edition)

IRVING, John

ISBN 10: 0747503346 / ISBN 13: 9780747503347

Published by Bloomsbury, London, 1989

About this Item

First British edition and first printing. Hardcover. 543 pages. One of Irving's most beloved novels. The basis for the movie "Simon Birch" which starred Ashley Judd and David Strathairn. A very good plus copy with the inevitable toning to the pages and some slight pushing to the spine ends and in a near fine dust jacket with some slight sunning to the spine. Signed by Irving on the title page and uncommon as such. Seller Inventory # 204547

Bibliographic Details

Title: A Prayer For Owen Meany (Signed First ...

Publisher: Bloomsbury, London

Publication Date: 1989

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

From the author of "The World According to Garp", "The Hotel New Hampshire" and "The Cider House Rules", this novel tells the tale of two 11-year-old boys in New Hampshire. When accidentally one kills the mother of the other, events move to a tragic conclusion.

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