A son of the Circus,
by John Irving, is a novel of characters. What I mean by this is
that it is not plot driven, but more of a study of the highly
varied cast of personages that inhabit it. The plot twists,
the mysteries, murders, etc, are merely a
background against which different people
get to reveal themselves to us.
Its
main character is an orthopedist doctor by the name of Farrokh
Daruwalla. An indian that is not an indian. An eternal
outsider. “Foreigners are foreigners all their life”
his late father would say.
And what a father he was. Always
critical of everything and everyone, from India and its caste
systems to Ghandy. Nobody was spared his opinions, christians,
muslims, hindu, parsis...
Dr. Daruwalla was born in Bombai (now
Mumbai), educated in a catholic school, studied medicine in
Vienna where he married a vienness woman
and went on to reside in Toronto, Canada.
By this chancy way of growing up, he
missed the important moments of his native country (the independence
of India) and whenever he goes, he's never truly at home.
But this is also the story of several
other characters, all of whom revolve around him one way or
another:
His adoptive brother, an actor that
goes by the improbable name of Inspector Dhar, who happens to be
one of the persons the Bombai populace loves to hate. He stars
in a series of movies, written by Dr. Daruwalla (who happens to be a
closet screenwriter) that always manage to enrage someone, by
stereotyping and making allusion to
generally believed prejudices (the police is always corrupt,
taxi drivers are maniacs, etc). In his non-indian life, he is a
serious theater actor. He also has a twin brother whom he has
never met:
Martin Mills, Dhar's twin brother.
He doesn't even knows he has a brother and his story is one filled
with frustration and self pity. He arrives as a priest in
training completely clueless of the city hatred toward
a man who is his identical twin. Hilarity ensues, but not for
long. He is rescued by one of Dr. Daruwalla's dearest friends:
Vinod. A dwarf who is a former
circus clown turned entrepreneur. He
owns a rather shabby taxi company and is Dhar's and Dr. Daruwalla's
driver and link to India. He is also of special interest to the
doctor, because in addition to being an
orthopedist, he is also trying to find the genetic markers for
achondroplastic dwarfism.
Inspector Patel, the real policeman
(as opposed to the fiction that is Inspector Dhar), and his wife
Nancy cross the doctor's path at crucial moments in his life. To say
more of them, would be to give away an important part of the book.
Several other characters: a
transsexual, two orphan children, an
semi-competent obstetrician, an always disapproving
steward, Hollywood vermin,
find their ways in this book, by means of several murders,
fanatic proselytizing, acts of charity,
AIDS, menacing phone calls and many others situations.
The timeline for this books jumps
back and forth to key parts of the Doctor's life: his youth with his
parents and his studies in Vienna, his second honeymoon (now in his
forties) and the present, with an age weary Farrokh haunted by
the ghosts of the past.
Even tho this book is not intended to
be about India (as the author clearly states), it gives an insight
of the world of Bombai, however shallow an insight it might be.
For people interested to learn about this city, they could do worse
than this book.
A side note:
Until recently, to the best of my knowledge Inspector Dhar was a
fictional character that only exists in this book. However, Salman
Rushdie in his book The Moor's Last Sight
also makes mention of him, along with other famous detectives of
fiction.