🔗 Share this article

If some authors have an peak era, in which they reach the heights time after time, then U.S. author John Irving’s extended through a sequence of four long, rewarding works, from his late-seventies success The World According to Garp to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. These were generous, witty, warm books, connecting characters he refers to as “outsiders” to social issues from women's rights to reproductive rights.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning results, except in word count. His previous novel, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had examined more effectively in earlier books (inability to speak, short stature, gender identity), with a lengthy script in the heart to fill it out – as if extra material were required.

Thus we approach a latest Irving with caution but still a small glimmer of expectation, which shines stronger when we learn that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere 432 pages in length – “revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 book is one of Irving’s very best works, located mostly in an orphanage in St Cloud’s, Maine, managed by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Wells.

This novel is a failure from a author who once gave such pleasure

In Cider House, Irving explored abortion and belonging with colour, humor and an total understanding. And it was a significant novel because it abandoned the themes that were evolving into tiresome habits in his works: the sport of wrestling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

This book begins in the fictional village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in young ward Esther from the orphanage. We are a few years ahead of the action of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch remains familiar: even then addicted to the drug, beloved by his staff, beginning every speech with “In this place...” But his presence in the book is restricted to these initial parts.

The family fret about parenting Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “in what way could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent understand her place?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s later life in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will join Haganah, the pro-Zionist armed group whose “purpose was to defend Jewish communities from opposition” and which would later establish the core of the Israeli Defense Forces.

These are massive themes to take on, but having brought in them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s frustrating that Queen Esther is hardly about the orphanage and the doctor, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s likewise not really concerning the main character. For motivations that must relate to plot engineering, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for another of the couple's children, and delivers to a baby boy, Jimmy, in World War II era – and the lion's share of this book is his narrative.

And here is where Irving’s preoccupations come roaring back, both common and specific. Jimmy goes to – of course – the city; there’s talk of dodging the draft notice through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a canine with a significant title (the animal, remember Sorrow from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, prostitutes, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

The character is a less interesting persona than the female lead hinted to be, and the supporting figures, such as students the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are one-dimensional too. There are some amusing scenes – Jimmy deflowering; a confrontation where a few ruffians get assaulted with a crutch and a tire pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a nuanced author, but that is not the issue. He has consistently restated his points, hinted at narrative turns and allowed them to accumulate in the audience's thoughts before taking them to fruition in lengthy, shocking, funny scenes. For example, in Irving’s novels, physical elements tend to be lost: remember the speech organ in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces resonate through the story. In Queen Esther, a major person suffers the loss of an upper extremity – but we merely find out thirty pages later the end.

She reappears late in the book, but merely with a last-minute sense of concluding. We not once learn the full story of her experiences in the Middle East. This novel is a disappointment from a novelist who once gave such delight. That’s the negative aspect. The upside is that His Classic Novel – I reread it alongside this work – even now holds up wonderfully, four decades later. So read it instead: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but a dozen times as enjoyable.