Stikkord: John Irving

A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

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irving_meanyThis was a pleasant surprise for me, in terms of John Irving, as I’d concluded I needed to give his novels quite a bit of time before «getting into them». Not so much with this one, it had my interest before I’d reached the 50-page mark.

With around 100 pages left I got to work Monday morning after reading on the bus (as you do), opened the lokal paper’s web edition, saw a picture of Norwegian soldiers in uniform and thought «Huh? We have troops in Vietnam?»

A novel that makes me forget which century I live in? Now that’s a good sign.

It happens occasionally, but not all that frequently. I met a Norwegian who was on an exchange programme from the Norwegian army to the Swedish army in Stockholm once and my first reaction was «But I thought we were at war?», since I was currently embroiled in the Napoleonic wars in the company of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. This confused the poor bloke no end until one of my friends told him not to worry as my madness was of the harmless sort.

But back to Owen Meany. It’s a compelling story, where you get to know increasing amounts about the end throughout which I frequently find annoying but which Irving makes work. I realised what would happen some time before it happened, but not, I think, before the author intended.

Until I Find You – John Irving

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I brought Until I Find You by John Irving along to The Gambia in February, despite being in the middle of Aubrey/Maturin. I thought it would be a good idea to bring a book I could leave behind. Which it would have been, of course, if I’d had more time to read so that I had actually finished it, or if it had been uninteresting enough to dump half-finished. I didn’t and it wasn’t, so it came back home again, and having (finally) finished O’Brian last week I picked up Irving again.

I have some issues with Irving. This is only the second Irving I have actually managed to finish (the first being A Widow for One Year), and it’s a question of circumstance rather than of them being essentially different to the ones I tried and failed with. In both cases I have brought them along for travel reading, so that in both cases there haven’t been all that many other options beckoning me. This is to Irving’s benefit, because I find his novels really slow to start with. In the case of A Widow for One Year I positively disliked the first part, getting more interested once Ruth-as-adult entered the scene, and it wasn’t until two-thirds of the way through that it acquired the can’t-put-it-down-quality of a really good read. Until I Find You similarly drags at the beginning, and though I found Jack and Alice more interesting all the way through, I probably wouldn’t have persisted if I hadn’t already read A Widow for One Year and known Irving to be a slow starter (unlike the Vienna trip, I did bring other books to The Gambia, so I had a choice).

That said, once the pace picks up after a twist in the tale, it really picks up, and I resented having to put the book down for any reason throughout the last 200 or so pages. I felt a little let down by the ending when I read it, but only a little, and it’s growing on me.