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If a few writers enjoy an peak phase, during which they hit the heights repeatedly, then American writer John Irving’s ran through a sequence of four fat, rewarding novels, from his 1978 breakthrough Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were generous, humorous, compassionate novels, connecting characters he refers to as “outsiders” to societal topics from women's rights to reproductive rights.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining results, save in page length. His previous novel, 2022’s His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages long of topics Irving had explored more skillfully in earlier books (selective mutism, restricted growth, trans issues), with a lengthy film script in the center to extend it – as if filler were needed.

Therefore we approach a new Irving with care but still a faint flame of optimism, which burns stronger when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a just 432 pages long – “goes back to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is among Irving’s finest novels, set largely in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, managed by Dr Larch and his apprentice Wells.

The book is a disappointment from a author who previously gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about abortion and acceptance with richness, humor and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important book because it left behind the topics that were turning into repetitive tics in his works: the sport of wrestling, ursine creatures, Vienna, the oldest profession.

This book starts in the imaginary community of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome teenage orphan Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a several generations prior to the events of Cider House, yet the doctor stays identifiable: even then using ether, adored by his nurses, opening every address with “At St Cloud's...” But his role in this novel is limited to these opening parts.

The couple worry about parenting Esther properly: she’s Jewish, and “how could they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent understand her place?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish migration to the region, where she will enter Haganah, the pro-Zionist paramilitary organisation whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would subsequently become the foundation of the Israel's military.

Those are huge subjects to address, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is hardly about the orphanage and the doctor, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s additionally not focused on the titular figure. For motivations that must relate to plot engineering, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for another of the family's daughters, and gives birth to a male child, James, in the early forties – and the majority of this story is the boy's story.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both regular and specific. Jimmy goes to – of course – Vienna; there’s discussion of evading the military conscription through self-harm (His Earlier Book); a dog with a meaningful designation (the animal, meet the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, sex workers, authors and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

He is a less interesting figure than the heroine suggested to be, and the secondary players, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are flat also. There are some amusing scenes – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a handful of bullies get beaten with a crutch and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a nuanced author, but that is not the difficulty. He has repeatedly restated his ideas, hinted at narrative turns and allowed them to gather in the viewer's imagination before bringing them to resolution in lengthy, surprising, funny sequences. For instance, in Irving’s works, anatomical features tend to be lost: think of the tongue in The Garp Novel, the finger in Owen Meany. Those absences reverberate through the narrative. In this novel, a key figure is deprived of an limb – but we only discover thirty pages the end.

She comes back in the final part in the story, but just with a eleventh-hour sense of ending the story. We not once do find out the full account of her time in the Middle East. Queen Esther is a failure from a novelist who once gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – I reread it alongside this work – even now holds up beautifully, 40 years on. So pick up that instead: it’s twice as long as Queen Esther, but a dozen times as great.