A Son of the Circus - ISBNLookup.com

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Though there are flashes here of the dramatic verve of The World According to Garp and Cider House Rules , Irving's long-awaited eighth novel is generally a tedious affair: rambling; lacking suspense; devoid of energetic or lyric prose; sometimes verging on farce and other times almost as lethargic as the sultry atmosphere of Bombay, where it is set. Here Irving is concerned again with people who do not feel at home in the world: immigrants, social outcasts, pariahs because of physical handicaps, those uncomfortable with their sexual orientation. The characters include a Bombay-born physician and secret screenwriter who feels as much a foreigner in India as he does in his new home, Toronto; a movie star who is synonymous with the role he plays; his twin brother, who aspires to be a priest but doubts his vocation; assorted circus performers, dwarfs and cripples, prostitutes, transsexuals, policemen, Hollywood figures, a blonde American hippie, Jesuit missionaries and more sad folk teeming with strange quirks and shameful secrets. The plot revolves around the murders of prostitutes by a transsexual serial killer, who carves a winking elephant on their bodies, and the legacies from the past that bring the main characters to the hunt for the murderer. The hefty narrative gives Irving plenty of room to speculate on outcasts of all kinds, the volatility of sexual identity, the false lure of organized religion, the insidious evil of class distinctions, the chasm between appearance and reality. For those looking for his trademark leitmotifs, Irving provides two: falling into the net and allowed to use the lift . He titillates by equipping a character with a giant dildo. He includes a strange homage to novelist James Salter. His attempt to provoke readers into empathy for humanity's lost souls is admirable, but his novel does not engage the reader until the last hundred pages, and that may not be soon enough to satisfy those yearning for a seductive story. Sept.

Library Journal

A circus displays oddity and spectacle for our amusement. Irving wields his absurdist ideas, set forth in works like A Prayer for Owen Meany LJ 3/15/89, to create a world with much the same feel. The setting is India, though there is little sense of locale a circus being universal and transportable. At center stage is Farrokh Daruwalla, an alienated, middle-aged, Bombay-born doctor who returns to his birthplace to study circus dwarfs. Farrokh becomes entangled in a case involving a serial murderer who carves the image of a winking elephant on his victims' torsos. This storyline bounces around like the proverbial three-ring circus and features a cast of eunuchs, hippies, movie stars, transsexuals, and clergymen. Irving continues his obsession with potency erections and negation mutilation and self-mutilation using, for instance, a large hollow dildo as a central prop. This otherwise enjoyable read is hindered at times by a lethargic pace and lack of dramatic tension. Although not Irving's best, this long-awaited novel will be in high demand. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/94.]-David Nudo, "Library Journal"

Donna Seaman

Irving's eighth novel is a feast. Picking up stylistically where "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (1989) left off, Irving has perfected his impressive narrative skills and launched into unexpected territory: a murder mystery rife with antic sexuality and set in the seething city of Bombay, home of India's film industry (Bollywood), hoards of street urchins and prostitutes, and the last tattered remnants of British colonialism. Irving achieves an almost Dickensian richness with his cast of vivid and eccentric characters, loopy yet converging plot lines, moral underpinning, and predicaments both hilarious and wrenching. Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, a dreamy fellow at home neither in his native city of Bombay, nor his adopted domicile, Toronto, is at the heart of this dynamic universe. When in Bombay, Daruwalla indulges his peculiar passions for collecting blood from dwarfs (to study their genes) and for going to the circus. When he isn't occupied with these amusements or practicing medicine, the good but distracted doctor is busy writing the screenplays for an egregious yet wildly popular series of films featuring the hero Bombay loves to hate, the sneering Inspector Dhar. The enigmatic star of these provoking movies is a magnet for trouble in the form of a dangerous admirer who has transformed himself from a boy into what passes as a woman. Dhar's life is further complicated by the arrival of his heretofore unknown identical twin. Irving's nimble humor springs from compassionate insights into cultural and sexual confusion and alienation, baffling questions of faith and purpose, and the kind of hope that thrives in even the most jaded atmosphere.