Queen Esther: Irving Recyles but Tells a Good Story

 

 

 

QUEEN ESTHER (2025)

By John Irving

Simon and Schuster, 432 pages.

★★★★

 

I was charitable when I reviewed The Last Chairlift in 2023. It was supposed to be the last novel from John Irving. That didn’t turn out to be the case, as late last year he released Queen Esther. It should have been everything I hate: a (semi-) sequel (of The Cider House Rules, 1985) and deals with shopworn themes such as wrestling (every novel since 1973’s 158-Pound Marriage);  small people (A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1985); a male raised by feminists (The World According to Garp, 1978); confused sexual identity (Garp, In One Person, 2012), a lost limb (1981’s The Fourth Hand), and Vienna (every novel since his first, Setting Free the Bears, 1968). Speaking of bears, they are about the only thing in Queen Esther that’s not been recycled (and that includes Irving's fixation on penises). And yet… Queen Esther has its virtues.

 

John Irving might not be an author who goes to great lengths to avoid repetition, nor is he a careful self-editor. (Queen Esther could use both a developmental editor and a veto-proof copy editor.) All of this said, when it comes to storytelling, Irving can plausibly be compared to Charles Dickens. (Dickens also needed editors.)

 

Concerning the book’s title, in the Old Testament, Esther was married to Xerxes, the king of Persia. She was Jewish, but hid her identity. When Mordecai failed to bow lowly enough to satisfy Haman, Xerxes’ top advisor, Haman sought to exterminate the Jews. Esther’s intervention saved them and is the background to the Jewish holiday of Purim.

 

You’re wrong if you think Irving is making a backdoor political statement; he goes through the front door! This novel has been praised in Jewish sources, both because Irving carefully researched Jewish culture and is respectful of Zionism. Through his characters, Zionism is a desire not to be assimilated or persecuted, as well as moral battle to maintain Jewish identity. (Is it a mere coincidence that Haman is just one letter off from being Hamas?)

 

In the novel, three-year-old Esther Nacht (born in 1905) loses both of her parents to anti-Semites. She is sent to St. Cloud, Maine, which fans of Cider House Rules will recognize as the site of an orphanage (and underground abortion clinic) run by Dr. Wilbur Larch. Larch is an ether addict, but a kindly man who quickly realizes Esther as more world- and book-wise than most adults. After settling in, Esther becomes a beloved resident of St. Cloud’s, though the Jewish identity that she embraces is a problem; there just aren’t many Jews in St. Cloud. Larch finally locates a New Hampshire family to adopt Esther when she’s 15. Tommy and Connie Winslow aren’t Jewish, but they despise anti-Semitism, and Esther comes to regard them as her parents and their three daughters as her sisters. When Honor, an unexpected fourth is born, Esther practically raises her. She and Honor eventually share another bond; Honor wants to be a mother but is scared of childbirth and Esther wants to experience pregnancy, but has zero interest in parenting. Thus, a wrestler impregnates Esther and the child, James is given to Honor to raise. As in Garp, “Jimmy” grows up in a houseful of dominant women.  

 

The bulk of the novel is devoted to Jimmy growing up in the 1960s. Esther and Honor persuade him to wrestle in the hope he will suffer an injury that will exempt him from the Vietnam War. He’s fine, but his interest in becoming fluent in German leads him to take his college JYA in Vienna, where he wrestles for exercise. There are two tough Russians who might be able to lame Jimmy, but they become friends rather than manglers. Plan two: If Jimmy can impregnate a woman he could secure a parentship exemption. This part of the novel is long on the ambiance of post-World War II Vienna. (Spoiler: It was gritty rather than elegant.) Jimmy wouldn’t mind losing his virginity to his beautiful tutor, Annaliese Eissler, but she has a more important mission to complete. His roomies in the tawdry boarding house are Claude, a French Jewish student, and Jolanda, a lesbian.

 

Jimmy, like his birth mother Esther, finds himself caught up in a world in which identity and history have imprinted his future. Add a few puppeteers pulling his strings and Jimmy is Garp version II. Some readers have complained that in Irving’s disjointed telling, Esther too often fades into the background. They’re not wrong!

 

Rob Weir

Mrs. Brown: Top Drawer for the Post-Hogmanay Viewing

 

 

 

MRS. BROWN  (1997)

Directed by John Madden

Miramax, 103 minutes, PG

★★★★★

 

New Year’s Day is a holiday, but most people party on New Year’s Eve. Scots certainly do; for them, December 31 is Hogmanay. It roughly means gala day but whether it’s a Scots word, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, or French is up for debate. Today it bears similarities to First Night celebrations, but some places have bonfires, special foods, gift-giving, folk customs, and pipe bands.  

 

It just seemed the right time of the year to rewatch one of my favorite films, Mrs. Brown. I’d not disagree with charges of sentimentality, though I’d counter that it demonstrates how fine acting can carry a film in which relatively little action occurs. One reason why British films are, on the whole, superior to Hollywood movies is that many U.K. actors are classically trained and are hired for their chops, not necessarily their looks. Hollywood creates drama through pyrotechnics, loud music, and over-the-top speeches; British cinema finds drama in human interactions, even if the ”star” is a queen.

 

If you know about the British monarchy, you will have noticed there is a strict protocol for being in the presence of royalty. It prevails, though the monarchy has had no political power since 1689. Royals are to be treated regally and behave as such. You probably also know that little shocks U.K. tabloids as much as a good royal scandal. (Think Lady Diana, Sarah Ferguson’s divorce, and Prince Andrew for starters.) What we learn is that royals aren’t special when it comes to human foibles.

 

Mrs. Brown deals with one of Britain’s most revered monarchs, Queen Victoria (1819-1901). She took the throne weeks after she turned 18, married Albert (her first cousin) when she was 21, had nine children, and was quite happy until Albert died in 1861. We now associate Victorianism with a certain morbidity because the Queen went into mourning for most of the rest of her 63-year reign. When Albert passed, she stayed at Balmoral Castle draped in mourning gear and out of sight for two years. That was not a good thing for two powerful political figures vying for the prime minister’s chair in Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. As we see in Mrs. Brown, Disraeli (Antony Sher) and his party are sinking in popularity and hope to lure Victoria (Judi Dench) out of mourning to boost Disraeli’s electoral chances.

 

The question is how to get Victoria out of Balmoral Castle in Scotland and back to London’s Buckingham Palace where she can regularly wave to the citizenry. Enter John Brown (Billy Connolly), a former soldier who was once Albert’s ghillie (a gamekeeper).  He is called to Balmoral is to get Victoria to go riding and recover her health so that her closest advisors, Henry Ponsonby (Geoffrey Palmer), Dr. Jenner (Richard Pasco), and her son “Bertie,” the Prince of Wales (David Westhead) can convince Victoria to leave Scotland. (As the English often felt, they hated it there.) Problem: John  Brown was loyal to the queen but not to the toffs surrounding her. Brown reveled in being a rugged Scot who liked tweaking upper-class snobs. A bigger problem: Victoria adored Scotland and Brown. The film correctly infers that the two of them may have been intimate. There was also a rumor that they secretly married, hence the film’s title. (Recent evidence has revived that possibility.)

 

Mrs. Brown is also a story of intrigue and of hubris. As Brown’s star rose at Balmoral, his plotters sought ways to discredit him. Victoria is persuaded to make a triumphant return to London and, for a time, Brown’s ego got in the way and he was out of favor. Still, Victoria refused to dismiss him. He was head of security in 1893, when he died (not of pneumonia as in the film, but of a bacterial infection).

 

What a stroke of genius to cast Connolly as Brown. Billy Connolly is a seriously funny man who is far more coarse and irreverent in real life, just as Dench could herself be. I could go on about the crackerjack acting of this film, including Sher’s wiliness and Gerard Butler’s first role as Brown’s brother. The takeaway is the same; fill the screen with superb actors and let them metaphorically play winner-take-all chess. It was a surprise hit in 1997 and won numerous prizes despite being stiffed at the Academy Awards. Wha’ a bunch o’ glakits!

 

Rob Weir