After A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, there was a long stretch of time for Irving fans awaiting his new novel. A SON OF THE CIRCUS, Irving's eighth, arrived in 1994 to mixed reviews. The plot and geographical locations were even more complex, if such is possible, than his prior bestsellers. Irving introduced characters in foreign settings with foreign names who had physical and personality traits with which perhaps some readers simply could not identify.
Dr. Daruwalla is an ex-patriot East Indian living in Toronto.He doesn't feel at home in Canada, where he has spent most of his life, or in Bombay, his native city. His medical concern with dwarfism leads him back to India and the world of the circus where he can study and collect blood samples from the dwarves who still find employment in the ragtag traveling bands that crisscross the steamy, poverty-stricken, yet beautiful country of his birth. There he meets a dwarf and his family.
In an intriguing subplot we discover that Dr. Daruwalla is an aspiring playwright who provides scripts for India's most popular movie detective. When a real life murder takes place, the doctor becomes caught up in a manhunt for a serial killer. A nationwide search for the killer takes the reader on a spellbinding tour of India with encounters between street urchins, whores, child stealers and drug sellers.Probably the most ambitious of Irving's books --- because of the intricate plotting, the added element of the murder mystery and the fact that India is the one place with which Irving is unfamiliar --- CIRCUS has been acclaimed as both his best and his worst book.It remains one of my favorite Irving novels containing memorable characters with whom, if one can't relate personally, one can still empathize.
Irving said in an interview that "Of all my novels, A SON OF THE CIRCUS is the one that got the most letters from readers saying, in effect, 'I am Dr. Daruwalla.'Which was the point about him . . . that he was common, that his foreignness was growing ordinary. I never got very many letters from people saying 'I am Homer Wells,' or 'I am T. S. Garp.'"
A SON OF THE CIRCUS was more widely read and admired in Europe and Asia than in America. Indians, Irving said, appreciated the disconnectedness of Dr. Daruwalla, and also admired Irving's portrayal of their native land.
Irving has been working on a screenplay for the book for almost ten years and still hopes to see it translated to a movie.
--- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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