THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410200347
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE EDELMAN
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
A SON OF THE CIRCUS
JOHN IRVING
Random House. 633 pp. $25.
Farrokh Daruwalla is a perpetual foreigner. He doesn't feel at home in his native India or his adopted homeland Canada, and he doesn't identify with either his daytime job as an orthopedic surgeon or his nighttime career as a screenwriter. Like the high-wire circus artists he so admires, Daruwalla continually balances between two lives, two selves, and between conflicting loyalties.
In some ways Daruwalla resembles his creator, John Irving, in whose eighth novel, A Son of the Circus, he is the main character. Irving has a penchant for straddling fences, too: He's a popular novelist with highbrow pretensions as well as an old-fashioned storyteller with very modern concerns.
A Son of the Circus qualifies as one of Irving's oddest creations, but it's also among his most satisfying. It is a sprawling book that swoops around the globe and through multiple generations of history. And it includes a grab bag of trademark Irving ``topics'': perverse sexuality, Christianity, unusual families, societal outcasts, dwarfism, untimely death . . . all manner of ``foreignness.''
Superficially, A Son of the Circus is a murder mystery revolving around several members of Daruwalla's social hangout, the posh Indian Duckworth Club. The plot is compounded by the discovery of a note on the body of a murdered golfer that promises more deaths if John Dhar, Daruwalla's sort-of-adopted son, doesn't withdraw his club membership.
Death threats are nothing new to Dhar, a celebrity thriller actor in India whose films, featuring recurring character Inspector Dhar, have offended all castes and religions on the subcontinent. Because Daruwalla anonymously created Dhar's infamous screen identity and inspired such public vilification toward him, the doctor feels obligated to go to his assistance.
At first it seems that the murderer must be one of the hijra, a mysterious ``third gender'' of Indian eunuchs who were offended by the last Inspector Dhar film. With the help of real-life Inspector Vijay Patel, however, Daruwalla discovers that the murder is only one in a series of rapes and mutilations that have been going on for the past 20 years. All Patel has had to go on is the killer's bizarre signature of a winking elephant, drawn on the victims' bellies.
Things are further complicated by the sudden reappearance of Dhar's identical twin, Martin Mills, separated from his brother at birth by their irresponsible actress mother. Unfortunately, Mills, a zealous Christian missionary who doesn't know of his twin's existence, unsuspectingly pops up in India on the date that Dhar's new movie is released.
Despite the elaborate whodunnit plot, A Son of the Circus largely concentrates on the richly detailed family history of Daruwalla and Dhar. It has a dizzyingly large cast of characters interconnected in surprising and often hilarious ways. They're all linked by their search for a purpose, of course. And in India, which teems with its own contradictory background, anything goes.
When Irving is parading around his colorful troop of characters, A Son of the Circus is captivating fun. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, however, the meandering flashbacks and diversions come to a halt and the magic ebbs. As with all Irving novels (The World According to Garp, Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meany), the overriding question is: What was that all about?
A Son of the Circus is a three-ringer of a novel. MEMO: Dave Edelman is a free-lance reviewer who lives in Gaithersburg, Md. by CNB