A Son of the Circus
By John Irving
Random House, 633 pages, $25
It seems inevitable that a novelist of John Irving’s sensibilities-of his talent for chaos, drama and the absurd, of his mischievous chronicling of modern life by means of old-fashioned, even Dickensian narrative-would collide with India, and more particularly with Indian circuses. “A Son of the Circus,” Irving’s eighth novel, is beyond unrestrained; it’s a story of three-ring extravagance.
There’s so much of everything that it makes one’s head ache. Unlikely coincidences, mysterious phone calls, murders, mutilations and mixups of all sorts: between reality and fiction, between one gender and another (and even another!), between identities and identical twins. The surfeit is such that finicky readers are advised to choose a tidier entertainment.
Irving fans, however, do not want Less-Is-More; they want More and have come to expect a Rabelaisian intemperance in Irving’s work. The very thing that makes an Irving novel so bumptiously irresistible is that he’s a writer who pays no heed to the dangers of readerly dyspepsia and who makes other novelists’ work seem stinting and primly cautious.
As “A Son of the Circus” opens, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, an orthopedic surgeon who makes his home in Toronto with his
Austrian wife, returns to Bombay for a lengthy visit to that city of his birth. Educated abroad, and far from India at the time of her independence (in purposeful contrast to the hero of “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie, to whom this novel is dedicated), Daruwalla is a man so alienated from the culture of his homeland that he is only comfortable in his life as an expatriate.
Like Jenny Fields in “The World According to Garp,” like the orphans from “The Cider House Rules” or Owen from “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” Farrokh Daruwalla is an outsider. Doubly an outsider, in fact, for like his inventor, John Irving, Daruwalla is a writer, and that much more an observer of (rather than a participant in) his own culture.
Known to all but his family as a surgeon, Daruwalla’s deeper commitment is his secret one: as a screenwriter of the series of enthusiastically reviled “Inspector Dhar” movies.
During this visit to Bombay-one that Daruwalla declares is his last-the creator of the infamous inspector finds himself drawn into the search for a real murderer, a transsexual serial killer who, we learn, the doctor knew years before and whose first victims he had in fact examined. Inventor and invented conspire as the screenwriter consults with the actor who plays Inspector Dhar to catch the killer, who is himself borrowing an eccentric and brutal signature to his murders from the latest Dhar movie.
Or did screenwriter Daruwalla borrow the device from the killer, from those victims’ bodies he saw years before? Chicken-or-the-egg games abound in this novel, which in its disconcerting repetition of lines and scenes seems to question linear Western notions of time.
Of course, Irving’s vision is not a simplifying one. The actor who plays Inspector Dhar, and who was raised by Daruwalla, was separated at birth from his identical twin, who, having become a Jesuit, has just arrived in Bombay to join the St. Ignatius mission. Complications ensue as identities are mistaken; and, as this novel of soap opera twists and steamroller proportion (it seems to have ingested whole medical texts, travel guides, circus programs and movie scripts) rolls relentlessly forward, we watch as Irving takes on themes beyond those of alienation and the nature of time.
There also are the role of the artist in society, the hopeless yet irresistible quest for perfection and transcendence, not to mention the mysteries of gender and of sexual preference.
The novel is best in its lengthy middle, where the tried and true device of a stalking, striking killer is powerful enough to drive this behemoth forward. Before the killer fully enters the action and after we know his (her?) identity, the story slows, bogs down in flashback; it’s as if India and Irving are two potent chemicals that unexpectedly neutralize each other.
When the energy dissipates, only complications remain, and there are passages in this novel that made me feel as I had when traveling in India. Tired and ill, yet determined to get where I was going, I kept making different turns and ending up on the same dusty street corner with an equally distraught-looking cow, sacredness notwithstanding.
“A Son of the Circus” offsets its length and clutter with sideshow characters of nearly grotesque eccentricity, and Irving’s gift for dialogue shines particularly in his creation of Vinod. Circus dwarf turned chauffeur, Vinod’s lilting Hindi-meets-English diction, with its charming overuse of the gerund (“Who is needing both hands for steering?”), enlivens all his scenes and makes the reader’s return to Toronto with Dr. Daruwalla a genuinely sorrowful departure.
Back in Toronto, the story at last settles on the doctor’s alienation as the central crisis of the novel, and suggests that a firm sense of identity offers a cure.
But when Daruwalla, working in an AIDS hospice, responds to a hysterical woman’s “Who are you, anyway? What are you?” with “I’m a volunteer,” and then, in a subsequent scene, to a child’s asking him, “Where are you from?” with “I’m from the circus,” his words and attendant sense of belonging come as disappointingly sentimental and pat resolutions to the predicament of the outsider-one to which, given this writer’s consistent return to the theme, Irving has no such ready answers.
Of course, Irving, like Dickens, to whom he is heir, is sentimental; and like Dickens’, Irving’s is a signature sentimentality, adequately tempered and offset only in “The World According to Garp.” “A Son of the Circus” is not Irving’s best work, but it is often vivid and enjoyable, and, despite his opening disclaimer that “This novel isn’t about India. I don’t know India,” he has produced a remarkable evocation of the country, even if it is one that showcases all of its noise and none of its equally striking silence.
Irving’s Bombay is so pungent that when Daruwalla returns to Toronto (a city where the novelist also has a home), we’re surprised to discover that it is a less compelling and even less believable place than the invented India. So much for writing about what you know.
