Wierd, wonderful world. Review on World According To Garp, The - John Irving

Robust, wildly imaginative, strange – John Irving’s fiction is all this and more. His most acclaimed novel The World According To Garp is filled with strange events and people. Born to a World War II nurse and a comatose soldier, Garp’s conception is a strange story in itself. But wait, it gets even more strange and fascinating. Brought up on the campus of an elite school where his mother works, Garp marries his childhood sweetheart and grows up to be a writer. His novels create quite a furore. Irving throws Garp into most ludicrous situations. Rape, feminism, the loss of a child, spouse swapping – all these elements are not merely woven in, they explode into the story. Certain common threads run through most of Irving’s stories. Wrestling for one. Irving, who as a child was severely dyslexic, found solace in wrestling. Ditto for Garp. Garp’s first major work features circus bears. So does one of Irving’s earliest novels, “The Hotel New Hampshire”. Bears in fact, appear in many of his novels. But to conclude that The World According To Garp is autobiographical, would be doing an injustice to Irvings vivid imagination. In novels like “A widow for one year”, he has loudly expressed his scorn for authors who thinly disguise their life stories as fiction. Irving takes his life experiences and inverts and distorts them to create stories that are bizarre and often comic, but totally real nevertheless.

An Irving novel is never left hanging in mid-air. No fashionably vague endings, thank you very much. While The World According To Garp ends with a bang, an epilogue also allows you a peek into how the characters move on in life. This draws you even closer into the story. For John Irving neophytes, this novel is a good initiation into his weird, wonderful world. For die hard fans like me, it is a vital piece of the Irving puzzle. These novels broadly fall into the magic realism genre. If you read one, I guarantee you’ll devour the others: “The Cider House Rules” (now a movie), “A prayer for Owen Meany” (a heartbreakingly funny take on the Vietnam war era), “A son of the circus” (set, interestingly enough, in India). A note on the author. Irving is dyslexic and has to work that much harder on each novel. Surely, that is very inspiring for us all!