Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3548 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'

From the Publisher
reviews
'So extraordinary, so original, and so enriching…' STEPHEN KING, Washington Post

'Marvellously funny…the author's wit is an intrinsic part of the book, as the happy brilliance of a sunshaft seems to be part of the landscape it brightens. What better entertainment is there than a serious book which makes you laugh?' PHILIP GLAZEBROOK, The Spectator

'I believe it to be a work of genius…because of its absolutely irrepressible flow of invention and suggestion, expressed in some of the most fascinating prose written in fiction today. Originality has distinguished all Mr Irving's books, but in A Prayer For Owen Meany it achieves a new pitch and a new profundity' JAN MORRIS, Independent

'May justly join the classic American list' ANTHONY BURGESS, Observer

Customer Reviews

A modern classic
Owen Meany is one of the great fictional characters of our time. In my opinion, this is the novel in which John Irving reaches the peak of his form. The humour, irony, pathos and humanity that Irving puts into all of his novels blends so well here to create the quirkiest of all stories. Owen Meany is maybe the most unlikely hero of any novel but this extraordinary book tells his story and makes us understand what a hero he is. Very moving.

Weeping for Owen Meany
I've just this minute finished Owen Meany and I my eyes are filled with tears. So much is already said about this book. I will simply say that I was impatient through the book, although I enjoyed it, because I didn't understand where it was going. I should have understood all the time that Owen was speaking to me, the reader, as much as to John in saying that "A LITTLE FAITH IS NEEDED".
I perservered (and really it wasn't such a difficult task) and at the end was the reward which was unbelieavbly moving. The most touching story I've ever read - just so emotionally and spiritually big, but accessible. Maybe that was the point. Don't let your impatience get the better of you, treasure every page like you would each moment of your growing child - because the end comes all too soon.
Reaching the conclusion is an epiphany in itself, but its a book full of revelations about humanity and God even to the hardened atheist, the most unsentimental or even the driven agnostic like me. It was a privledge.

My favourite book
5 stars doesn't really do this justice. John Irving transcends perfection with 'A Prayer For Owen Meany'. This book is probably the most moving piece of literature I've ever read. That's not because it's particularly sad. It's more down to the love felt by the narrator towards Owen, and Owen's immense faith.
There's not much more that can be said without ruining the intricate plot. Owen Meany is a magical character and I would recommend this book above any other.