From a number of interactions with the Wheelwright family through to stunning decisions that could significantly shape his adult life, Owen Meany finds a way to make his impact felt by all those around him, sometimes in a saviour-like manner. The rest of the novel is set in a number of vignettes involving John and Owen, surrounding by a number of other characters who cross their paths throughout this complex friendship. Owen attributes this as an act of God, one in which he is a vessel for the Almighty. One summer day in 1953, Owen hits a foul ball on the baseball field and ends up killing John’s mother. Owen is unlike many other children his age, as his best friend, John Wheelwright, has come to discover. Some attribute this to the family granite company, while others prefer to keep the mystery alive. With this, he has the most grating voice one could imagine. Owen Meany is a small child, much tinier than those his age.
A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God.To begin the year, I tackled one of John Irving’s classic novels that found me laughing throughout, while also extracting some of the serious themes. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum-the two characters share the same initials. The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy-from Vietnam to the Contras. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes-accurately-that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.
0 kommentar(er)
