Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving review – dreaming the past into life

A picaresque tale about ageing and adventure, moving from Mexico to the Philippines, tackles the big questions with gusto and charm

^“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims,” John Irving told the Paris Review in 1986, when he had published six novels, including The World According to Garp; his next would come three years later, with A Prayer for Owen Meany, which remains his bestselling novel and one that can still induce a Pavlovian flood of tears in many readers. Simple as it might sound, Irving’s description is nicely ambiguous: does the searching imply identification, the finding of victimhood through the excavation of character and personal history? Or does it more strongly relate to another kind of excavation – a sorting through the post-disaster rubble in the hope of finding survivors?

In the kind of novels that Irving writes, of course, the answer is both; layering and juxtaposing multiple slices of the past, he achieves a kaleidoscopic narrative effect, in which fragments of history are repeatedly shuffled to present a perpetually changing picture. At the same time, he is much concerned with forward momentum, with propelling his protagonists through a heavily populated world of tragicomic coincidence and resonance. “I’m not a 20th-century novelist,” he also told the Paris Review. “I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the 19th-century novel ... I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an intellectual.”

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