Bloomsbury £18.99 pp824

Let us be clear from the start what we are dealing with. This is a novel so big it requires planning permission to read it outside, a novel so obsessed with the penis that it rivals Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer for phallocentrism (although it has none of that book’s fierce stylistic energy) and a novel so boring that, halfway through, I became gripped by vertigo from staring down its white cliff of unread pages.

John Irving has, over the course of his strange, prolific career, made a great deal of money and won a huge number of readers. From The World According to Garp (1977) onwards, he has told novel after lengthy novel in his friendly, left-field voice. His vast and simple plots, livened by eccentric interests (wrestling, prostitution) and oddball characters, have generally concerned the search for safety in a chaotic world. Warmth and a wacky charm have been his insignia.

That warmth has faded to the dullest of glows in Until I Find You, and that charm has curdled into sourness. The book tells the life-story of Jack Burns, between 1969 and 2000. When we first meet him, aged four, he is on an international city tour with his tattooist mother, Alice. They are in search of Jack’s libidinous father, William, a gifted church organist addicted to tattoos and sex. In each city they visit, they discover that, before moving on, William has performed the same trio of actions: he has had a phrase of musical notes tattooed somewhere on his body, has played one of the city’s organs, and has broken a girl’s heart.

When they reach Australia without catching William, Alice gives up and returns with Jack to America. From here, the novel turns into a baggy bildungsroman for Jack and his penis (who becomes known as the “little guy”, and who gets extremely well educated in the course of the book). Jack goes to a posh boarding school, to college in New Hampshire, then becomes a renowned Hollywood actor. Along the way he is sexually assaulted by a number of women, makes voluntary love to several others and wins an Oscar. At the book’s affectless climax, he tracks down his father, whose actions are revealed to be the function of a rare obsessive-compulsive disorder.

That a novel about repetition should repeat itself might, in certain circumstances, be excused as a novelist’s conceit. When those repetitions are sustained over 824 pages, however, one is forced to conclude that the cause is bad writing of a previously unseen order of magnitude. Irving repeats everything. The same jokes (about eyebrows, tattooing, penises) are told many times. The church organ/sexual organ innuendo is sounded in the first few pages, and never allowed to die away. Subtlety of every sort is abolished; if there is the remotest chance of the reader not following an insinuation or plot turn, Irving will devote the subsequent paragraph to its explication. That most reliable indicator of crudeness of thought, the exclamation mark, is to be found in abundance.

Repetition is accompanied by its close relative, excess. Irving lards his book with surplus information. We are treated again and again to guidebook-style introductions to each new location (“The Oude Kerke was probably consecrated in 1306 by the Bishop of Utrecht and is the oldest building in Amsterdam”, etc etc). Other problems abound. There are inconsistencies and errors of tense. Metaphors slip and slide: a “mound” of herring in one sentence becomes, unmolested, “an archipelago” in the next. There are carelessly caricatured ethnic minority walk-on parts.

All of this is conveyed in prose of remarkable dullness. To write 824 pages this monotonous — to have chosen always the mediocre word, the unevocative phrase — must be considered an accomplishment of sorts. Colourless place-holder adjectives (“vivid” and “interesting”) are used a lot. Careless phrases (“ good-looking”, “pretty”) describe incidental characters. The best Irving can do when describing the response of a victim of sexual abuse is to note that she “made a wail”. The plot is propelled by such banal predictions as “the older woman thing . . . would haunt Jack all his life”.

So the novel proceeds, vast and remorseless as an oil tanker on steering lock. When, after 678 pages, Jack’s psychoanalyst tells him he has “been a very faithful storyteller — and a very thorough one”, one nods with weary assent. When he continues, “but you haven’t revealed yourself, Jack. I still don’t know who you are”, one’s heart fibrillates with thrilled horror at the realisation that there are still 150 pages to go. And when, at the end, Jack asks himself “how will I know when I’m finished? It just goes on and on”, one sobs with despair at the thought of a sequel.

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