Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3270 in Books
• Published on: 1990-05-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mum with a baseball and believes--correctly, it transpires--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. 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. 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. The scene of doltish Dr Dolder, Owen's shrink, drunkenly driving his VW down the school's marble steps is a marvellous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. 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 change the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history and God. --Tim Appelo

DOMINIC HOLLAND, Sunday Express
'a heartbreaking masterpiece of a novel... tremendously ambitious and fiendishly clever'

Synopsis
Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen does not believe in accidents and believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying.

Customer Reviews

Life Changing? Not for me.
Having greatly enjoyed `The World According to Garp' I was looking forward to `A Prayer for Owen Meany `which has the reputation of being Irving's best book. But I was sadly disappointed and remain somewhat baffled by the praise heaped on this novel - it is not dreadful, but not wonderful either.

I didn't warm to Owen, while at times intriguing I found him increasingly annoying as the book progressed. THE DECISION TO HAVE ALL OF HIS SPEECH IN CAPITALS DOESN'T HELP AS IT FEELS LIKE HE IS SHOUTING & LONGER PASSAGES ARE DIFFICULT TO READ. John Wheelwright the narrator is bland and dull, only distinguished by his love of Owen. Which leaves only the supporting character to add interest, I'd have liked more of Johns', Mother, Grandmother & his cousin Hester.

My second problem is that the book is too long by at least 200 pages. The basic plot elements would make a decent novella. Once Owens fate is mostly revealed, about half way through, narrative & character getting lost in a long wade through dull and often repetitive diversions on religion, Vietnam, contras, Johns boring life in Canada. Before we finally get anywhere near a conclusion. I was tempted to give up about 2/3rd through, only carrying on in hope of a revelatory ending.

My biggest problem though is that while Irving seems to be trying to make points about faith and religion. It isn't clear what they are, and the whole thing becomes increasing turgid. Some claim this book as life changing (though without saying how their lives have changed). They are I think reading it as an endorsement of faith, but I'm not sure if that is the intention. Irving twice quotes Thomas Hardy on `living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently' and the underwhelming nature of the key `revelations'' here (Johns father, the detail of Owens fate) seem to fit with that view. But it is such a mess of ideas it is difficult to know what Irving intended.

A novel I will remember, but couldn't recommended.

Takes your breath away
Every few months I take time out from my work and sit and read these reviews on Amazon, just to remind me of this wonderful book and to bring back my experience of reading it for the first time. Five minutes into reading the reviews and I'm silently weeping.

It's a utter privelidge to have had the opportunity to read such a book.

Beautiful Owen
I read this a few weeks ago and half-way through it I thought it was a bit over-long. It's a great story and the characters are superb - Owen has to be one of the best characters of all time. But it's a bit of a marathon of a book and as I read it I just wanted to finish it - not because it was boring but because I'm always eager to read my next book. However, as I got towards the end a strange thing happened. The closer I came to finishing it the more I didn't want it to end. The more you get to know Owen the more you want him to be part of your life forever. And you know what? I think he will be. A truly great book. Long... but you might end up wishing it was longer.