John Irving is one of those American novelists that I’ve always been afraid to read. Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, John Updike, John Irving. I knew I’d read through a whole book and not get it
. Mostly this impression comes from seeing people who read these novelists. Well, now I’ve read one.
I have to say, there’s something about the novel that I just don’t get. It’s a good story, albeit on the long side. But it feels like there is some purpose for which Irving wrote the story, other than it being a good story. And I’ve missed it.
The overwhelming thing that kept hitting me while reading the book is that it’s like watching Lost. Through the first 400 pages or so of the books I think only a little over a day passed in time. The bulk of the story through that point is told through reminiscing to points in time past, mostly to a period about 25 years prior to the beginning of the book. I found that a trifle annoying.
The main character is Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, a Parsi Indian who doesn’t really feel at home in India, or anywhere for that matter. He returns to India periodically to run a charity hospital, and also to write screenplays for bad Indian crime drama about the policeman Inspector Dhar. As a doctor for a movie filmed in Bombay some 25 years ago, he got the film bug and began writing the screenplays. Not so coincidentally, the starlet of the film became pregnant while filming and had twins. Secretly. She returned to America with one of them, entrapped the drunken screenwriter of the film whom she believed had fathered the child into marrying her, and began an unhappy and fruitless Hollywood career. Meanwhile, Farrokh’s brother Jamshed raised the other twin in Austria. By the time of the beginning of the story the second twin John D. was returning to India a few times a year to star as Inspector Dhar for his uncle
Dr. Daruwalla.
Do you follow that? The thing is, Inspector Dhar (as he is mostly referred to in the book) isn’t really Indian though he sort of passes for one. His movies are hated. That’s why they are successful. Everyone goes to see them so they can talk about what a despicable anti-hero Dhar is. Consequently the actor Dhar has to be pretty careful not to get assaulted by the various people the movies offend.
All this is thrown in to disarray when the first twin, Martin Mills, decides to visit India. He doesn’t know he has a twin. He’s a confused apprentice Jesuit. He does get assaulted and assumes it is God testing him.
And the other wrinkle to be thrown in to this is the appearance of a serial killer who murders prostitutes and draws elephants on their stomachs after he kills them. One of the reasons why everyone is mad at Dhar is that the latest Inspector Dhar movie features a serial killer who draws elephants on the bellies of his victims. The public assumes that a copycat has taken the gimmick and run with it, but they blame Dhar for giving him the idea.
Except that Daruwalla isn’t really that imaginative of a writer. Twenty years ago he was a doctor called to a scene where two bodies were found with elephants drawn on the stomachs. He incorporated the device into a movie much later. And, unbeknownst to any of them at the beginning of the book, the killer isn’t really a copycat, but actually the original killer. It’s been his signature as he’s killed throughout the years. But some of the killings happened in other countries, and the ones that occurred in India weren’t particularly well-publicized because of India’s system and culture.
Oh, and the circus fits into all of this when Daruwalla’s driver attempts to rescue children from the streets by getting them employed as performers in the circus, where he met Daruwalla years before when he was a circus clown.
Okay, got all the sub-plots in order? Yeah, there’s a lot of them.
Even if tedious sometimes, I mostly enjoyed watching Daruwalla’s interactions with the other characters. He’s very passive, but also fairly judgmental. I suppose this is part of why he doesn’t feel like he belongs to India. There’s a scene at the end in Toronto (a couple of scenes actually) where Daruwalla takes a much more forceful role, for want of a better term. Forceful isn’t quite the right word, as he is quite capable of vehemently arguing in many places in the book. But in the scenes at the end he shocked me by doing something that was reactive. Just conversational things. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but it seemed out of character even compared to other things in the same chapter.
I also liked the concept of a film property that is popular precisely because everyone hates it. Something like Jean Claude Van Damme but more popular. I want to see the Inspector Dhar movies now.
Anyway, it seems I don’t really have much to say after all. The book is not for the faint of heart. There are enough problems with the writing that it can be a bit difficult to read, and it is overly long. But it has great characters and decent intertwined plots.
Title: A son of the circus
Author: John Irving
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1994
Format: Hardcover
Length: 633 p.
ISBN-10: 0-679-43496-8
Subject: India — Fiction
LC Classification: PS3559.R8 S64 1994
