Fiction: We've had a spate of burglaries in our area in the last week but, reading John Irving's Until I Find You, I've felt a lot safer. Its 800-plus pages, dropped from the landing or even the half-landing, would do serious damage to any intruder. Unfortunately, that's about the best thing I can say of this rambling volume, writes John MacKenna.
Irving likes asides and there are lots of them in the book. He likes italics and there are lots of those with the asides. And he likes repetition, and there's lots of that, with the asides and the italics. What there isn't is a story that's entertaining or even mildly interesting.
Until I Find You follows Jack Burns, successful actor, from childhood to his late 30s. It begins with the young Jack being taken by his tattoo artist mother across Europe in search of his runaway, organ-playing father. As the church organ is central to his father's life, so Jack's organ - his penis - becomes central to his, even before the 10-year-old is introduced to sex by his female, 40-something wrestling partner.
Unfortunately, Irving seems to have forgotten that size isn't everything - in penises or novels - and he isn't a man to let the organ/penis idea go - rather he grinds forever onwards, long after we've made the connection, long after he might have put the metaphor back in its literary trousers.
Nor does he spare us any details about the cities visited by the young Jack and his mother. Each city's tattoo artist and his style are stamped - forcefully - on the reader's brain. Information is given, often, it seems, simply because Irving has researched it.
Almost 300 pages into the book, he comments on Jack's homework - "(it) was less demanding than it was repetitious". The same could be said of the novel.
A hundred pages later Jack interrupts his friend Emma - who is giving him more gynaecological information than he needs - with: "Stop". Irving adds - "he didn't want to know all the treatments she'd tried". Amen.
I'm loath to be scathing about anyone's writing but this book is weighed down with more problems than a maths paper. It's far too long. It's repetitive to the point of annoyance. And it's unconvincing - from the characters who people it to its melodramatic and unpersuasive conclusion. Worst of all, it undervalues its readers' intelligence.
Take this, from page 765:
"'Huber here,' Dr Huber was saying into the phone by the door. 'I'm coming right away.' She came back to the table. 'An emergency,' she told Jack, shaking his hand. 'Another emergency.' Jack had stood up to shake her hand, all the others stood up, too.
The team and Jack, minus Dr Huber, prepared to leave the conference room. (Dr Huber had left in a flash.)"
Lucky old Dr Huber.
That's the kind of tedious, lazy, badly edited nonsense that litters this self-indulgent and overloaded tome.
Until I Find You is, apparently, based loosely on Irving's own life. It seems to me that he has gone to some lengths to keep fiction and fact apart and, in doing so, he has left us with a story that has neither heart nor soul. Instead it centres on Jack's organ and a story of cock and bull - with a lot of the former and even more of the latter.
What makes this all the more disappointing is the fact that we know Irving is capable of much greater things, as he proved with earlier works such as A Prayer for Owen Meany, The World According to Garp, and, particularly, The Cider House Rules.
John MacKenna is a novelist and short story writer. His new play, Breathless, produced by Mend & Makedo Theatre Company, opens on October 22nd at the Riverbank Theatre in Newbridge and goes on a nationwide tour from then until December
Until I Find You. By John Irving, Bloomsbury, 820pp. £18.99