I’ve read longer books, by James Clavell, Tom Clancy, Ken Follet and others, but not for some time. John Irving’s The Last Chairlift runs to 889 pages and it’s a pretty small font. It must have taken be a couple of months or so because it’s been my bed-time reading and that’s typically just ten minutes or so at a time.
I’ve read John Irving before: The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany and others and I’ve enjoyed them. And when I went skiing in New Hampshire back in the early 90s I recognised it as ‘John Irving territory’.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy The Last Chairlift but it does go on. It reads like a soap opera and ends rather arbitrarily. It’s a challenge to keep a track of the characters many of whom have different names within the book. You feel that sometimes Irving changes the name of a character within a single sentence.
There’s a review in the Guardian, click here, and I like the closing comment:
‘I’m afraid the book is also very poorly edited – if at all. There’s a lot of tedious repetition, while at one point Irving plonks over 150 pages of screenplay in the middle of the text. In it, there’s a line of dialogue that reads: “Unrevised real life is just a mess.” Unrevised manuscripts – the same’
I’m inclined to agree. It’s an enjoyable enough read but I did get to the end thinking that there were better uses of my time.
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