Skywalker

The new John Irving novel, the India book for which readers of many stripes have been waiting, is out at last—and it is wonderful in precisely the ways one expects of Irving. A Son of the Circus is a teeming, nerve-wracking, spectacular and ravishingly colourful novel, as the circus, Irving himself and India all require.

It is set almost entirely in India, with very brief forays into Zurich and Vienna ( which Irving cannot resist) as well as Toronto—where its hero, a Parsi orthopedic surgeon, lives when he is not on one of his extended, obsessive visits to the country of his birth. In Bombay, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla devotes his time to working at the Hospital for Crippled Children, drawing blood from dwarfs (in pursuit of the gene responsible for achondroplasia), circus-going, of course, and drinking diet beer (with huge meals) at the Duckworth Sports Club. On the side, he’s a closet screenwriter: the man behind the famous Inspector Dhar, whom Indians love to hate. He’s also a doting family man, with a wife and three off-stage daughters, as well as an unofficially adopted actor-son, for whom he created the role of Dhar.

Others in the cast include a real policeman, an Iowa woman with dildo, a Jesuit priest-in-training, some AIDS victims, a serial killer, assorted actors, circus folk, eunuchs and transsexuals, a dwarf limo driver, a child prostitute associated with the Wetness Cabaret and a crippled beggar who dreams of skywalking in the circus (upside-down and no longer lame). There are also elephants, lions, first-floor barking dogs, rats, vultures, bedbugs, mosquitoes, cobras, a racist chimpanzee, cows and a rather important crow.

The novel is full of sex and tenderness and danger. Humour too, of course. And it is masterful: superbly structured, stunningly well written. It goes on for 633 very ample pages, and you do not want it to stop. Or I did not. I read it on a three day car journey, with a seat belt stretched across my shoulder and my lap, and the car light turned on as soon as it got dark—which my husband hates. He claims it’s hard to drive that way. He knew, however, what I was reading, and that it was useless to protest. It would not have been possible to get me to turn out that light or, indeed, to spell him in the driving. (Knowing what I had in store, I had astutely left my driver’s license in my other purse.) In the daylight hours, I missed nearly all of the mountains, waterfalls and wild flowers, and the only company I supplied my stalwart driver was the occasional passage read out loud. (Compulsive reading, they call this; and it is certainly that.)

The seat belt, by which I was sometimes irritated, became in the end a seemly morsel—because a scene I had been anticipating with great eagerness, involving the reunion of identical twins separated at birth, begins (at last) when the brothers strap themselves in for a nine-hour flight from India to Zurich. The tease goes on, since Irving never gives us the scene directly; he gives us (and poor Dr. Daruwalla, who had arranged the momentous encounter, and longs for a properly detailed account of it) multiple and fragmentary versions instead. Curiously, I was not annoyed. Strapped in myself, and privy to the book as a whole, I found I knew all I needed to know.

A John Irving novel is always a ride. It’s a safe ride in the sense that you know you will be transported; you’ll be off and going somewhere. You feel what Dr. Daruwalla comes to understand about the proper start of a story, that “the characters were set in motion by the fates that awaited them. Something of the authority of an ending was already contained in the beginning scene.” (It is characteristic of Irving that his vast novels, for all their surprising turns, and for all the force of their narrative trajectory, are elegiac from the start.) At the same time, you know very well that there will be crashes of one kind or another—fatal disease or accident, rape, assassination, mutilation—within the novel: “If we crash, do we burn or fly apart in little pieces?” the child prostitute asks of Dr. Daruwalla. You don’t know when or how or who—but you know it’s going to happen, and that once may not be enough.

For the reader, anyway, it’s something like a ride on an intelligent roller-coaster. By this oxymoron, I mean to suggest that Irving’s terrors arise from an authentic vision. I remember reading an interview with him shortly after the publication of The World According to Garp in which he seemed to promise that in future books he would not arrange for shocking misfortunes to befall his characters. I thought then that this statement of intent was ill-advised; I thought he had found something that was not a formula, but a poetic truth and a truth toute simple. I was relieved, reading the next novel, to learn that he had changed his mind.

I have long admired how Virginia Woolf captures one vital rhythm of human life, the way that from moment to moment we can swing between exaltation and despair. And I believe that John Irving has captured and set his own stamp upon another kind of rhythm—less intimate, perhaps, but equally important. He makes us singularly aware of the axes which are suspended over all our heads at all times, and can fall at any point on us or those we love regardless of our merit or our continuing struggles on the field of love. (By this time, I cannot tell if the image of the axe is his or mine. But I often think of Irving’s work when I feel its presence: the undertow, or Under Toad, he called it in Garp.)

Irving takes kind and privileged people, who love one another dearly, and mixes them with others who are more eccentric, damaged, or despised; together they make a kind of extended family. And their joining, which is also an emblem of writerly empathy, occasions in the reader a sense of healing and celebration. Subsequent terrors underscore how vital this reconciliation is, precisely because some—but not all—of the tragedy is caused by the evils that his good characters oppose: heartlessness in general, and racism and sexual intolerance in particular. In the face of so much unavoidable tragedy, we understand more thoroughly the need to stop what we can, by “volunteering” for human decency. Thus, Dr. Daruwalla—who is subjected to a vicious racist attack in Toronto, and has trouble feeling at home anywhere in the world—wonders “if it felt as good to be assimilated as it did to be a volunteer.”

Daruwalla is a son of the circus because he casts his lot with crippled children and with marvels. He can live—indeed, his imagination demands that he live—on that precarious continuum. He is beguiled by lore, such as the ringmaster’s cure for asthma, “a clove soaked in tiger urine.” Dr. Daruwalla’s fascination with lore, with “items” (standard circus numbers) and with certain haunting phrases is clearly that of Irving himself, whose novels always mythologize themselves by self-referentiality. Thus, to take one small example, he allows a character’s startling claim that “a pasta diet improved one’s stamina for the rigours of buggery” to be repeated, in an elegiac key.

Few writers, it seems to me, can imbue their fiction so thoroughly with ideas about writing without, at the same time, losing readers. A Son of the Circus, with its scriptwriting protagonist, is deeply concerned with the art of fiction. Irving even manages an extended homage to his friend James Salter! He packs in Dickens and Trollope—assigning his own respect for these writers to Daruwalla’s wife, rather than Daruwalla himself. It is she who is responsible, too, for their regular attendance at Harbourfront readings in Toronto. But much of the writerly play is in the writing itself, the curious way that Irving identifies characters—”the recuperating dwarf,” “the ex-zealot”—or the metafictionally nuanced verbs that he employs, like “alarm,” “astonish,” “console” and “delight.” Those are fair words to end on. ♦

Constance Rooke, critic, editor, academic and short-story writer, is Associate Vice President (Academic) of the University of Guelph. She was the editor, for ten years, of The Malahat Review, and is the author of Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing. She edited the anthology Night Light: Stories of Aging, and more recently, Writing Away: The PEN Canada Travel Anthology.

A Son of the Circus by John Irving Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1994 Hardcover, 633 pp., $32.00