For some reason, Johnny doesn’t really seem to hold a grudge against Owen, even after Owen kills his mother (admittedly accidentally, but that's one heck of a forgiving guy) and gets together with Hester, Johnny’s cousin and the only person he seems to love. After the tragedy with the baseball, they continue to do everything together. The two boys’ lives are intertwined as they grow up and they do everything together. Which I suppose is quite true to life but in prose it seemed humdrum to me. Actually, perhaps ‘charms’ isn’t the right word – he manages to get his own way most of the time, though the friendship between Owen and Johnny seems to be driven by Owen’s need to help Johnny and Johnny’s need for help (at school etc), and Owen’s desire to be a part of Johnny’s life rather than vice versa.
He charms Johnny so much that the two even remain friends after Owen hits a dodgy baseball and kills Johnny’s mother. For some reason, despite SPEAKING IN CAPITALS throughout the whole book (something I found intensely irritating), Owen charms everyone he meets. Owen is super brainy, super small, super high pitched and, quite frankly, weird. Through Johnny’s eyes we see Owen as a diminutive, weirdly voiced sage who believes he is God’s Instrument. The narrator of the novel is eleven year old Johnny, who is Owen Meany’s best friend. Actually I lie about the third reason reasons sound better in threes.īack to Owen Meany. And thirdly, house buying and accompanying tightening of purse strings led me to believe that reading would be a splendid and cheap activity for the time being. Secondly, we were away snowboarding and had about 6 hours of travelling each way, not to mention nights by the log fire in the chalet to consider, and Grazia magazine just wasn’t enough for a week of that. This was further backed up by a chance encounter in the gym (shame on me!) when a random gym lady came up to me and told me that she ‘absolutely loved that book’ (I had been doggedly persevering with it on the cycling machine in my lunch break). Said sister, when told of my plans to abandon Owen (as we came to anthropomorphise The Book) accused me of fickleness and by inference, inconstancy towards her brother, life, etc. Firstly, I was given the book to read by the bloke’s sister.
The reasons for my continuing Herculean attempts to finish it were threefold.
Had it been my own choice of reading material, I would undoubtedly have abandoned it a long time ago. Finally finished A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, surpassing my previous record for slowness ( Genome, just too scientific for one sitting), which probably indicates my feelings towards the book.
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