A Son of the Circus

Boyd Holmes is a librarian at the University of Western Ontario.

John Irving’s eighth published novel is a fat, winding, tangled,
tragicomic, and subplot-rich mystery set largely in contemporary Bombay.
The cast of characters is of Dickensian size and weirdness. The hero, a
middle-aged Indian-Canadian orthopedic surgeon, specializes in the study
of dwarfs and writes screenplays for Indian trash movies. Among the
other characters is a pair of homosexual identical twins, one a film
star, the other a Jesuit. Despite his odd professional interests, the
doctor-hero is arguably the dullest person in the book—a bland snob
whose interest, for the reader, flows from the fascinating events and
situations he experiences.

Like a 19th-century novel, A Son of the Circus is meticulously
organized into 27 titled chapters and 126 titled subchapters. Rather
than introduce his conflicts and characters all at once, Irving sensibly
unfolds his setting gradually. The freakishness of the characters and
events seems, at times, contrived and self-conscious. Fans of Irving’s
previous books, however, will probably not be disappointed.