John Irving’s novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O’Connor’s work.

Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen’s orphaned best friend), the rough comedy.

The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school’s marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it’s all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, “fun with a purpose.” When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn’t cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred.

The book’s countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy–from Vietnam to the Contras.

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