Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2474 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

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.

Against the tide
This was the first book by John Irving I've read and I found it rather too drawn out for its own good.I can't believe I've read the same book as the other reviewers or is the Irving publicity machine so convincing as to warp the literary sensibilities of a large part of the educated population.
As soon as I picked the book up and saw the location (New England) I knew I was in trouble,I don't go a bundle on the intellectually aspirational type people who write from that neck of the woods,they seem to write for sewing cicles and coffee mornings in my mind,but maybe I'm just bitter and twisted.Its just too comfortable for me ,like being smothered with expensive cushions or drowning in warm beer.But maybe thats what the general public wants it obviously sells in vast quantities.
To sum up I think I was too impressed by the shining accolades bestowed upon it.It obviously touched many people and I suppose these will be among his loyal fans, mainly made up of spiritually retarded sentimental dreamers with unrealised literary ambitions,but I guess I'm being a tad cruel and reactionist now.

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