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If certain novelists experience an golden phase, where they achieve the summit repeatedly, then American author John Irving’s lasted through a run of four long, rewarding novels, from his 1978 success The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were generous, funny, big-hearted works, linking protagonists he refers to as “outliers” to cultural themes from feminism to reproductive rights.

Since Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, except in page length. His previous work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages of subjects Irving had examined more effectively in previous novels (inability to speak, restricted growth, transgenderism), with a two-hundred-page script in the heart to extend it – as if filler were necessary.

So we come to a new Irving with care but still a small flame of hope, which shines brighter when we find out that His Queen Esther Novel – a only four hundred thirty-two pages long – “revisits the setting of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s top-tier works, located primarily in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Larch and his protege Wells.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a writer who once gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about termination and identity with vibrancy, wit and an total empathy. And it was a significant novel because it abandoned the topics that were evolving into tiresome tics in his novels: grappling, wild bears, the city of Vienna, the oldest profession.

Queen Esther begins in the fictional community of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome young orphan Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a a number of generations before the action of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch is still recognisable: already dependent on the drug, adored by his caregivers, opening every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his role in Queen Esther is restricted to these opening sections.

The Winslows fret about parenting Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how might they help a adolescent Jewish girl understand her place?” To tackle that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will join the paramilitary group, the pro-Zionist armed force whose “goal was to protect Jewish settlements from Arab attacks” and which would subsequently become the core of the Israel's military.

Such are enormous themes to take on, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that the novel is not actually about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s even more disappointing that it’s additionally not focused on the titular figure. For motivations that must connect to narrative construction, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for a different of the couple's offspring, and gives birth to a male child, the boy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this book is the boy's tale.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy moves to – of course – Vienna; there’s talk of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-harm (Owen Meany); a pet with a significant name (the animal, meet the canine from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, authors and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

The character is a less interesting persona than the heroine hinted to be, and the secondary figures, such as pupils the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are one-dimensional also. There are several nice scenes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a few bullies get beaten with a support and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a nuanced author, but that is not the problem. He has always restated his points, telegraphed plot developments and enabled them to accumulate in the reader’s thoughts before bringing them to fruition in lengthy, surprising, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s works, body parts tend to go missing: think of the speech organ in Garp, the hand part in His Owen Book. Those losses reverberate through the plot. In this novel, a major character is deprived of an limb – but we just learn 30 pages before the end.

Esther reappears late in the story, but only with a last-minute feeling of concluding. We do not do find out the complete story of her time in Palestine and Israel. The book is a failure from a novelist who previously gave such delight. That’s the downside. The positive note is that Cider House – I reread it alongside this work – yet remains wonderfully, after forty years. So pick up it as an alternative: it’s much longer as this book, but 12 times as enjoyable.