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If certain authors have an golden period, in which they reach the heights time after time, then U.S. author John Irving’s extended through a series of several substantial, gratifying books, from his 1978 breakthrough The World According to Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were generous, humorous, compassionate works, tying protagonists he describes as “misfits” to societal topics from gender equality to reproductive rights.

Following Owen Meany, it’s been declining returns, save in size. His last work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages long of topics Irving had examined better in previous novels (selective mutism, short stature, gender identity), with a two-hundred-page film script in the heart to extend it – as if extra material were needed.

Thus we come to a recent Irving with caution but still a small glimmer of hope, which glows brighter when we find out that Queen Esther – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages – “revisits the setting of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is one of Irving’s very best books, set largely in an institution in the town of St Cloud’s, operated by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer.

Queen Esther is a failure from a writer who in the past gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving explored termination and acceptance with colour, comedy and an all-encompassing empathy. And it was a important book because it abandoned the themes that were becoming annoying habits in his novels: grappling, bears, Vienna, the oldest profession.

The novel starts in the fictional community of New Hampshire's Penacook in the early 20th century, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome teenage foundling the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a a number of generations ahead of the events of The Cider House Rules, yet the doctor is still recognisable: already dependent on the drug, beloved by his nurses, beginning every talk with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in the book is confined to these early sections.

The family fret about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a adolescent Jewish girl find herself?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s later life in the twenties era. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will become part of the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary group whose “purpose was to defend Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would subsequently become the core of the IDF.

These are huge topics to address, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that this book is hardly about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s additionally not focused on the titular figure. For causes that must involve plot engineering, Esther ends up as a surrogate mother for another of the family's children, and delivers to a baby boy, Jimmy, in World War II era – and the majority of this story is Jimmy’s narrative.

And at this point is where Irving’s obsessions come roaring back, both regular and distinct. Jimmy relocates to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of evading the Vietnam draft through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a pet with a meaningful designation (Hard Rain, meet the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, streetwalkers, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

The character is a less interesting persona than the heroine hinted to be, and the secondary players, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s instructor Annelies Eissler, are flat also. There are some nice set pieces – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a handful of ruffians get assaulted with a support and a air pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a nuanced novelist, but that is isn't the problem. He has always reiterated his arguments, telegraphed plot developments and enabled them to accumulate in the viewer's imagination before bringing them to completion in long, shocking, entertaining sequences. For case, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to be lost: recall the oral part in The Garp Novel, the digit in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces reverberate through the plot. In the book, a major character suffers the loss of an limb – but we just learn thirty pages before the end.

The protagonist reappears late in the story, but merely with a last-minute sense of wrapping things up. We not once learn the complete account of her life in the Middle East. This novel is a failure from a author who once gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it in parallel to this book – still remains wonderfully, four decades later. So read it as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but 12 times as good.