aprayerforowenmeaney

A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

It is a compelling, intoxicating idea, that one's life has purpose -- and such a specific purpose. Terrible Destiny.

I would define tragedy as the destruction of potential -- something that could be so good or could do good or someone who could be so great falling, dying, being destroyed. It's not just failure, it's failure on a grand and bohemoth scale. It's a grand fall from spectacular heights. In that case, I would call A Prayer for Owen Meaney a modern day tragedy.

Owen's life parallels the life of Christ -- not just in the immaculate conception (which seemed kind of hokey to me) or the sacrificial death, but in the way that from very young he is a leader, the center and mover of everything. It says at one point that special light always shone on him. He is the Voice -- the voice of the people. He grows up struggling against the authority of the headmaster, and it is a struggle he wins by losing. He is loved by everyone but even those to whom he is closest do not understand his calling, his destiny. And I guess the end result is what would've happened to Christ's followers had there been no resurrection: severe scarring and bitterness, a wound they cannot overcome. Hester turns her wound into "success" through angry music, John basically does nothing but let his pain eat him alive.

My biggest complaint with the novel is about the personality of John. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. He is sidekick to the extreme -- a spectator to Owen's story, to the point where you have to wonder how this bland milktoast could be the best friend of someone as provocative and exciting as Owen Meaney. Yet the author seems to go to great effort to make him a nothing, a nobody -- from the symbolic "Joseph" role in the nativity to complete sexual failure as a teenager to his suspected status as a "nonpracticing homosexual" as an adult. He says at the funeral "something inside me was missing, and that something was Owen." So this isn't just a weakness in the writing -- poor characterization -- it's intentional, a choice made by the author to make the narrator a nobody. Why? I don't know why. It could be a quick fix -- write a 500 page book then have an editor or reader tell you that the narrator needs more personality, and it's much much easier to go back and insert here and there hints that he's not supposed to have any personality than it is to go back and do the massive rewrite that would be necessary to develop his character. So is it Irving being lazy? Or is it there some reason he's a nobody, some reason I just don't see?

I think the biggest challenge in taking on a novel like this -- or at least like the second half -- is the tension that has to be maintained to keep the reader reading. You know what's going to happen, it's just a matter of how; it's just the mechanics of it. The author has to play the delay just right -- if it happens too fast, you lose the magnitude of the ending, you lose the tragic sense. And if the author dawdles and hesitates too much, the reader loses patience and skips to the end. I think that Irving plays this balance fairly well, but not perfectly -- there were points when I was tempted to skip to the end. The novel may be about fifty pages too long.

I was intrigued enough by the historical setting of the novel to research the Vietnam War on my own. I borrowed a bazillion-hour-long documentary on Vietnam from the library and am working my way through it.

I don't know what to make of the religion here. You certainly can't deny that it's there and a major theme through the novel, but it doesn't take on familiar forms. Doubt and faith are the central issues. Owen says "faith" a lot, and it seems mostly to mean believing that nothing happens by accident. Not exactly a conventional understanding; not exactly "belief in things hoped for; being certain of what is unseen." The pastor says that "doubt is the essence of faith" which I don't agree with(I'm more comfortable with a variant a la Kathleen Norris: the opposite of faith is not doubt but fear.) And while he is an admirable character through most of the novel, by the end he seems weak, destroyed by his doubt. Narrator says something about this. The narrator (Johnny) believes in God only after Owen's "prophecies" about himself comes true. So the existence of God is proven because things happen for a reason, as Owen always believed. It doesn't matter that the proving incident is tragic; this is refreshing as we don't get that old "I can't believe in a God who..." line that essentially sets us up as judges over God, the punishment we dole out being our own lack of belief. As if existence has anything to do with belief, or conduct. Instead, God exists and does what He wants for His own reasons. The problem being that it doesn't seem to matter that God exists, no seeking after Him or letting his existence affect the way life is lived. There is no following, there is only acknowledging. Unless you're chosen like Owen Meaney, God exists but is unknowable and basically has nothing to do with your or anyone's life. Problematic; if God has nothing to do with life down here then why would he bother to choose and use Owen, or Jesus? (Owen says that Jesus was "used".) But that's an unanswerable question, at least on the terms of the book -- because God does things for his own reasons, which are unfathomable to us.

The politics are memorable and resound with me; that could be just my anti-Americanism resounding with the narrator's. Two voices do not truth make. Yet I do believe that Americans have little sense of history, which amounts to little corporate memory. Also that we have a screwed up sense of morality, especially public morality, if we have any sense of that at all. Things two -- history and morality -- could be and probably are connected. I especially like what Owen says about Marilyn Monroe being like America and about televangelists being the future politicians.