I really enjoyed the beginning of the book, but found myself less and less thrilled with it as the story wore on. In part I think that’s a function of its almost comical reliance on foreshadowing and that slow, steady drip of suspense surrounding questions like what ever happened to Owen Meany, who was Johnny Wheelwright’s father, what exactly happened to the elder Meanys, etc. I very much enjoyed the way Irving constructs a tripartite deistic character for Owen - he is at once the voice, the hands, and the son of G-d. I wish that this characterization was a good deal more subtle though. An alert reader should have picked up on this idea by the end of chapter 2 or thereabouts; but he doesn’t stop there, and just keeps piling on more and more allusions and hints and so forth, well beyond the point where it’s clever and interesting. This same problem applies to all of the other themes in the book - that of armlessness and mutilation. As if the image of Owen in the final scene is not sharp enough to remind us very clearly of the pivotal historical character who first appears early in the book, Owen actually says the guy’s name. (Apologies for the ellipticism, but I’m hoping to avoid a spoiler.)

All that said, I very much enjoyed the various ruminations on fate, and the paradoxical concept (which surely has a name, but I don’t know it) of taking measures to meet one’s fate, even though one cannot avoid it; it could have been grabbed, I suppose, straight out of a Greek tragedy. I thought it was cleverly arranged, even though I could see it coming, for the most part. What was most impressive was the way the granite motif is interweaved into these ruminations; granite is a very difficult thing to alter, but Owen and his family are in the business of mining and moulding it to the best of their ability, in much the same way that Owen, in a fashion, shapes his own fate even though he is resigned to it.

Finally, I must admit to a certain nostalgia brought on by this book. Not for the 60s, which I missed by something like two decades depending on how you count, but for the literature of the 80s. I haven’t read a book from this era in a little while, I suppose, and in some ways I miss the way that the symbolism is all so global, so neatly constructed, the storylines so tidily wrapped up by the end, the characters such well-measured pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with a straightforward message. Recently it seems to me that literature has come undone at the seams a little more; the point of a book is a good deal more muddled, the aim seeming to be more to evoke a feeling than to make a point. Perhaps that’s a good thing for the art form, I wouldn’t know enough to say, but I do sort of miss this simpler time in the letters. It’s funny how much has changed in the relatively short time since this book was published!