🔗 Share this article

If some writers have an imperial era, in which they reach the pinnacle consistently, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s ran through a series of four long, satisfying novels, from his late-seventies hit Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were expansive, funny, warm books, linking characters he refers to as “misfits” to social issues from gender equality to termination.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining results, save in page length. His previous book, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages in length of themes Irving had examined better in earlier books (mutism, restricted growth, trans issues), with a 200-page script in the heart to fill it out – as if padding were required.

Therefore we look at a latest Irving with reservation but still a tiny glimmer of expectation, which shines stronger when we find out that Queen Esther – a mere 432 pages in length – “goes back to the world of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 work is among Irving’s very best works, set largely in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Dr Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

The book is a failure from a author who in the past gave such delight

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about abortion and belonging with richness, humor and an total compassion. And it was a significant novel because it abandoned the themes that were evolving into repetitive tics in his novels: wrestling, wild bears, Vienna, prostitution.

This book starts in the made-up town of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome young orphan Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a few decades ahead of the action of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch stays recognisable: even then using the drug, respected by his nurses, opening every address with “In this place...” But his presence in Queen Esther is confined to these initial parts.

The family fret about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s Jewish, and “in what way could they help a young Jewish girl find herself?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s adulthood in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary force whose “mission was to defend Jewish communities from Arab attacks” and which would eventually become the basis of the IDF.

Those are massive subjects to tackle, but having brought in them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is not really about St Cloud's and Dr Larch, it’s even more disheartening that it’s additionally not focused on the main character. For reasons that must involve plot engineering, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for a different of the Winslows’ offspring, and bears to a baby boy, James, in World War II era – and the majority of this story is his story.

And now is where Irving’s fixations reappear loudly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy moves to – naturally – the city; there’s mention of evading the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (Owen Meany); a canine with a significant title (Hard Rain, recall Sorrow from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, streetwalkers, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

The character is a duller figure than the female lead promised to be, and the secondary characters, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are one-dimensional also. There are several enjoyable scenes – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a handful of ruffians get assaulted with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a delicate writer, but that is is not the difficulty. He has repeatedly restated his ideas, foreshadowed story twists and allowed them to accumulate in the audience's mind before taking them to completion in lengthy, shocking, funny moments. For case, in Irving’s works, body parts tend to go missing: recall the tongue in Garp, the hand part in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces reverberate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a major person loses an limb – but we just discover thirty pages later the end.

She returns toward the end in the story, but merely with a eleventh-hour feeling of ending the story. We never learn the entire account of her time in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who previously gave such delight. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – I reread it alongside this book – yet stands up wonderfully, 40 years on. So read that instead: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but 12 times as great.