Book Review: "A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving

I was about sixteen when I read The Cider House Rules and eighteen when I read The World According to Garp. Those admittedly are the only John Irving novels I have ever read. This was mainly because I was really waiting to read them properly. I had already heard of the book A Prayer for Owen Meany when I was sixteen, but it looked slightly bigger than The Cider House Rules and I did not have too much time on my hands to read it. So I planned on saving the book for the summer. The summer came and went and no sign of the book, mainly because I couldn't find it in the library. After this, I basically just forgot it existed. Recently, when I was looking through my old books, I found some of my notes on The Cider House Rules and decided that now would be a great time to remember to read A Prayer for Owen Meany. To be honest, I wish I never forgot it. It is far better than I thought it would be.

About a boy called John and his friend Owen, this book circles around two boys growing older together and learning something strange yet spectacular. Owen is an intelligent child with a bit of an attitude problem. One day he is playing baseball with his best friend, John, when he accidentally hits the ball so hard it kills John's mother who is standing in the crowds watching the game. John has no real hard feelings and understands it was a tragic accident and the two go on growing up with Owen's attitude becoming much worse of a problem. But, in order to make it up to John who has to repeat ninth grade, Owen stays behind a grade voluntarily so both of them can grow up together.

Owen starts to get kicked out of school, causing some of his dreams to be denied. All of his dreams apart from one. Owen has a dream of his own horrible death and, once he has mastered a certain skill - it may just be the only way he might throw it off. Through joining the army, shattered realities and psychological retribution, John must face the fact that Owen has a strange something about himself which comes out in a production they put on at school of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in which Owen is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. From symbols of tombstones to the symbolism behind basketball and friendship, this book gets progressively darker and darker, leading the reader down a rabbit hole of the growing paranoid mind of Owen Meany.

I know that if you have read this book as well, you are probably thinking about this strange superiority complex that Owen has for the most part of the book. The fact that he thinks he is superior to his own headmaster at school first comes across weird and out of character but is later explained in a fairly odd explanation which involves who Owen's father is - and whether he is still around.

Written beautifully, this book is actually a lot darker than I expected it to be. Prophetic and alarming, strange and curious, this book pulls out all the stops when it comes to character development and doesn't let you miss a single piece of the puzzle that leads up to the ending. The ending itself is a brilliant production of the puzzle pieces scattered around the rest of the book. The superiority of Owen Meany is loud and clear as he tries to steer away the inevitable and steer towards the impossible.