If you only go a half-dozen times a year, that still means you go.' I mean, who knows? I'm an irregular churchgoer, but I go.

Of course, atheism is just another form of fundamentalist belief. I mean, how could they be sane after that?'Īs for Irving's own faith, he says, 'I don't like fundamentalists - of any religion. Maybe that's what happened to the disciples.

If I had been the witness to such a miracle, I would be crazy, I concluded. I tried to imagine a story that would make an absolute believer out of me. People did die for him, people did kill him. People would die for him, people wanted to kill him. If Rushdie's book asks the big questions about Islam, Irving sees his book as an investigation of the Christian dilemma: 'Whoever Christ was, he was someone extraordinary. When it was published in 1989, A Prayer for Owen Meany was kept from the top of the New York Times bestseller list only by Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. When Owen dies, exactly as he has predicted he would, we are asked to interpret it not as a rational event but as a miracle. His prescience spooks everyone, but the novel, narrated by Owen's best friend, the embittered, fragmented Johnny, opens with the promise that, 'I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.' Their friendship is at the centre of the novel, and one of its most gruesome moments is where Owen saves Johnny from getting drafted to Vietnam by slicing off his finger with a granite saw. He thinks he is God's instrument and will die a martyr's death. Most of the novel's charm lies in its eponymous antihero, a preternaturally intelligent, pint-sized prophet, whose fate is sealed when he hits a foul ball in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire and kills his best friend's mother. This work, which has now been adapted for the National Theatre, is the kind of book people get obsessed by the kind of book that inspires people to email unofficial fansites saying things like: 'If you have become jaded and cynical, Owen Meany will restore your faith in God, this world and yourself.' 'P eople have written to me that they have had religious, or near-religious experiences from reading A Prayer for Owen Meany,' says novelist John Irving.

A prayer for owen meany review