The Cider House Rules

We’re back with the Something Strange book club, and it’s a big fucking book this time!

It’s a sprawling coming-of-age novel about Homer Wells, a kid who grows up in an orphanage where a kind-hearted doctor, Wilbur Larch, delivers children and discreetly performs abortions as and when needed. Homer never quite finds a family to adopt him so he grows older in the orphanage and sort of becomes the doctor’s assistant.

One day a nice young couple show up who live on an apple orchard, and as a spur of the moment thing (and while having the hots for the lady) he decides to go with them and work on the farm. Meanwhile life at the orphanage continues, perhaps awaiting Homer’s increasingly less likely return.

People are reading a lot of Charles Dickens in this novel, which makes sense because The Cider House Rules is somewhat Dickensian in its style and structure. That is to say, paid by the word lots of vivid unique characters, all coming and going when you least expect it and always wrapping up neatly at the end.

I always wonder sometimes if the rapid passage of time in a story is a bit of a cheap trick to get people to cry, and making people reappear and reunite out of the past is also a solid tearjerker. Well there’s a lot of that here but it does kind of work, I got welled up pretty much on cue and at all the relevant plot beats.

I would say that the book takes on too many themes, and even with its length some important stuff gets a bit under-served. It touches on: love, loss, women’s rights, gay rights, worker’s rights, religion, race, migration, art, incest and violence among other things. The core love triangle is well developed but the final chapter introduces a whole lot more right as it should be coming in to land.

I enjoyed the Dickensian style of writing in the prose, the witty and relatable little ways Irving finds to describe people and places through the eyes of his characters. He also tends to swerve between story lines from paragraph to paragraph, but it’s mostly quite elegant and done with purpose.

I’ll be interested to see what inevitably has to go in the bin for the film version.