Avenue of Mysteries,

John Irving,

Doubleday, £20

FANS of John Irving, among whom I count myself one of the most devoted, revel in his rapacious storytelling. Like his hero, Charles Dickens, Irving is never in a hurry to spill beans. Invariably, his novels are long and meandering, full of incident and teeming with unforgettable characters. Unlike so many of his minimalist peers he is fond of parenthesis, exclaims with abandon and repeats audaciously. Nor is he afraid to give rein to his obsessions, of which he has more than a few: abandoned, orphaned children; circuses and their animals, penises, the joy of reading and sex, abortion and AIDS, the malevolence of religion, the absurd and the magical.

Irving is simultaneously a traditionalist and a modernist. As the even-keeled narrator of Avenue of Mysteries says of its main protagonist, a writer called Juan Diego who shares many of his creator’s precepts: “As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.” That is one of many wry and mischievous observations concerning the art of fiction made in the course of this long, challenging and absorbing book. Another worth bearing in mind is Juan Diego’s contentious assertion that, “The day women stop reading – that’s the day the novel dies!”

When first we meet Juan Diego he is 14. He is named after the peasant who, in 1531, on four occasions witnessed the appearance of the Virgin Mary in what is now known as Villa de Guadelupe, a suburb of Mexico City. He has a year-younger sister called Lupe who is blessed (or cursed) by being able to read peoples’ minds. It’s like living with someone with Tourette’s Syndrome, as she is given to blurting out what someone is thinking, which often isn’t politic. Lupe and Juan Diego’s mother, Esperanza, is a prostitute who has a part-time job as a cleaner for Catholic priests. Who their father is remains something of a mystery. Could it be Rivera, the boss of the dump on which the children scavenge? A sense of absence and neglect is another recurring Irving theme.

The children are among the poorest of the poor. It may be obvious to describe their situation as Dickensian but the temptation is irresistible. All over the world children live on dumps, foraging like rats among the detritus. The dump on which Juan Diego and Lupe exist is notable for the number of dogs with which they share it, as illustrated on the cover of Avenue of Mysteries, which shows a tribe of feral beasts, some of which are dead, in a desolate landscape.

Juan Diego’s route out of this hell on earth is through reading. On the dump – “the basurrero” – he often finds abandoned books. Thus his approach to reading is the very definition of serendipitous. He’ll try anything that comes his way and is rarely defeated, even by indigestible theological tomes and foreign languages. Eventually, Juan Diego becomes a writer himself, albeit one with a pronounced, Oedipal limp, the result of a run-in with a truck.

In a narrative counterpoint to the account of his upbringing (if such it may be dignified) we follow him to the Philippines where he must go in order to fulfill a mission to visit a war veteran’s grave. By now Juan Diego is in his fifties, famous among readers of a certain, female sort. He is also a slave to medication. To keep his heart ticking he takes Lopressor, a beta-blocker, while he is supplied with Viagra to help him perform sexually should the opportunity arise. One side effect of Lopressor is that it blunts the memory and stops him dreaming, which stunts his imagination. The alternative – death – is no more palatable. This, perhaps, is Avenue of Mysteries’ encompassing subject.

Juan Diego is assisted in his quest by a strange, sirenic mother and daughter who profess to be admirers of his work and who are no less interested in him. The daughter, Dorothy, who may or may not owe something to her namesake in the Wizard of Oz , is the orgasmic equivalent of Munch’s Scream. Not only is she loud, she hollers in Nahuatl, which is to Mexicans what Gaelic is to us. No-one is funnier than Irving when it comes to writing about sex.

Flitting back and forth in time, we are introduced to a cast of characters who are at the extreme end of colourful. There is a young, self-flagellating Jesuit whose forebears hailed from Dumfries, a transsexual health worker and a hippy with a tattoo of Christ on the Cross. Sex, death and religion is what binds them and others and death will befall many of them before the novel ends.

Meanwhile, Juan Diego emerges as one of Irving’s most memorable and fascinating creations, which is saying something. He is a twenty-first century Garp, the kind of lost child Dr Wilbur Larch would have rescued in The Cider House Rules, and as obsessed with the existence of God as Owen Meany. Indiscriminate, unguided reading has made him what he is, including books that have been cast aside like lost children. Like John Irving, it has taught him that there’s more ways than one to tell a story.

ALAN TAYLOR