There is only one Irving. That why you will easily draw parallels between other books written by him. Nonetheless, the originality and his manner to write makes it absolutely readable. If you like his latest books, you should not miss "The World According to Grap" as he made his breakthrough with it.

John Irving, The World According to Garp Review: Jenny Fields doesn't want a man. No. What Jenny Fields DOES want is sperm.

"My mother," Garp wrote, "was not romantically inclined."

Now this may seems like a conundrum for the less determined amongst us, but Jenny never suffered from lack of determination so she did what any sensible nurse in her position would do. She straddled a Vital Organ patient who was on his way to becoming an Absentee. He could only groan, what with having most of his lower intestine and rectum missing but on the plus side, his eyelids were also AWOL so he got to see what was happening to him. Apparently his name was Technical Sergeant Garp.


And so we witness the very conception of our mono-named hero.

Garp enters an exceedingly eccentric world and his life and loves are formed by the weird and wonderful people around him. Jenny his non-conformist mother will write A Sexual Suspect in her later years and become the darling of the feminist movement. We will meet Ellen Jamesians, women so fanatical that they drip in pathos having cut out their tongues in "sympathy" for the original Ellen who suffered this fate at the hands of a brutal rape attack. We will come to love Roberta Muldoon, the enormous transsexual ex-footballer with a heart of gold and we will struggle through life with the affable buffoon-like Garp, from his first illicit teenage fumble through some dodgy encounters with Austrian prostitutes, to his agonies as a cuckolded husband.

Oh, and before we get there, there will be some wrestling, there will be more than a mild encounter with the take-no-prisoners dog Bonkers (who Garp bites, obviously) and the wonderfully named Percy girls: Cussie and Pooh.

Nothing in this book is believable and yet somehow everything is.


In one sense this is a romp through the life of an eccentric and funny world, and I know that when I first picked it up at the age of about 13 that is exactly how I read it. Yet what makes it meaningful, what stops it being too fantastical is that it touches all the great themes - it is a book about sexual roles, about sex, about marriage, about parenting, about love and about struggle.

Did I say it is very very funny too?

Characters are well-rounded and thoughtful and so the outrageous feels more immediate and believable. Of course nobody should go around raping critically ill patients, it's simply an outrage. Humm, well that, my friends, is the skill to be found in Irving's deft touch: he makes it warm and he makes it funny and he makes it charming. I've never read of a rape that can do that before, all this and Garp hasn't even come into existence yet!

The World According to Garp is in the long and wonderful tradition of the shaggy dog story, and it has often been dubbed the domestic equivalent of Heller's Catch 22. It leaves you joyous but saddened, laughing and crying all at once. The danger of the shaggy dog story generally is that it just ends leaving the reader unsatisfied without any kind of denouement to signify the end - well not so Garp.

The climax is action-packed, yes there is a shooting, yes something happens to a man that should NEVER happen to a man and throughout we are silently menaced by the silent under-toad. The under-toad lives in the sea and can pull great ships, let alone little humans, under the waves forever more. Be afraid of the under-toad, it symbolises all those unexpected things that can jump out and get you when you least expect it - it is the witch under your bed, it's the goblins pinching you when you turn your back, it's the driver falling asleep at his wheel

John Irving has written some marvellous books - The Fourth Hand, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Hotel New Hampshire and the Oscar-winning screenplay of The Cider House Rules. I'm not saying The World According to Garp is certainly the best because they are all great, but quite simply this is the one I picked up first, and I know I will read it every few years for the rest of my life.


John Irving has awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has also won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award and an Oscar.