Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1211 in Books
• Published on: 1990-05-25
• 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

Who can forget Owen Meany?
Every now and then, about once a year or so, I take this book down from the shelf and just look at it for a while without opening it. You see, I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. I read the opening lines; again I am instantly captivated and find myself thinking of Owen Meany.
INTO PARADISE MAY THE ANGELS LEAD YOU

I read and read and this is my favourite book EVER
I read this when it first came out and despite me being almost completely devoid of emotion I couldn't stop crying at the end of this beautifully written book, and I have lost count of the number of people I have recommended it to. I am prompted to write this now as my book club have just chosen this for our next book so I am very excited about reading it again - wooohooo !!

A sublime work
Put quite simply, there are are now two parts to my life.

One: Before 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'
Two: After 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'

I hope I will be as affected by a book, or books, in the future. Somehow I doubt it.