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If a few writers experience an golden era, in which they achieve the pinnacle consistently, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s ran through a sequence of several substantial, gratifying novels, from his late-seventies success His Garp Novel to the 1989 release His Owen Meany Book. Those were generous, humorous, compassionate books, tying figures he refers to as “outliers” to cultural themes from women's rights to reproductive rights.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining outcomes, aside from in word count. His last work, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages long of subjects Irving had explored more skillfully in previous works (mutism, dwarfism, transgenderism), with a lengthy script in the middle to pad it out – as if filler were required.

Thus we approach a latest Irving with care but still a small flame of hope, which burns brighter when we discover that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages – “returns to the universe of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 work is part of Irving’s top-tier novels, set primarily in an children's home in Maine's St Cloud’s, run by Dr Larch and his protege Homer.

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

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored pregnancy termination and identity with colour, wit and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important novel because it abandoned the themes that were becoming annoying tics in his novels: the sport of wrestling, ursine creatures, the city of Vienna, sex work.

This book opens 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 home. We are a a number of generations ahead of the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet Dr Larch remains identifiable: even then dependent on ether, adored by his caregivers, beginning every speech with “In this place...” But his appearance in the book is restricted to these initial parts.

The couple fret about parenting Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a young girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To answer that, we jump ahead to Esther’s later life in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish emigration to Palestine, where she will become part of the Haganah, the Zionist armed force whose “goal was to safeguard Jewish settlements from hostile actions” and which would subsequently establish the core of the Israel's military.

These are massive subjects to tackle, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is not really about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disheartening that it’s also not about the main character. For causes that must involve narrative construction, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for another of the couple's offspring, and bears to a son, the boy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this story is Jimmy’s narrative.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both common and particular. Jimmy moves to – naturally – Vienna; there’s discussion of dodging the military conscription through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a canine with a significant designation (Hard Rain, remember the earlier dog from His Hotel Novel); as well as grappling, sex workers, authors and male anatomy (Irving’s recurring).

The character is a more mundane persona than the heroine hinted to be, and the supporting characters, such as students the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Annelies Eissler, are one-dimensional as well. There are several enjoyable episodes – Jimmy deflowering; a confrontation where a few bullies get assaulted with a support and a bicycle pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not once been a subtle writer, but that is not the difficulty. He has consistently repeated his arguments, hinted at story twists and allowed them to build up in the reader’s thoughts before taking them to completion in lengthy, shocking, amusing sequences. For instance, in Irving’s works, anatomical features tend to be lost: remember the speech organ in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those losses echo through the narrative. In Queen Esther, a key character suffers the loss of an arm – but we only find out 30 pages before the end.

She returns toward the end in the book, but just with a final impression of ending the story. We do not do find out the full narrative of her life in the region. The book is a failure from a author who once gave such delight. That’s the bad news. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it together with this work – yet holds up wonderfully, 40 years on. So read the earlier work as an alternative: it’s double the length as the new novel, but 12 times as good.