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If some writers experience an imperial era, in which they achieve the heights consistently, then American writer John Irving’s ran through a series of four long, gratifying works, from his 1978 success The World According to Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Those were expansive, funny, big-hearted novels, connecting characters he refers to as “misfits” to societal topics from feminism to reproductive rights.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning returns, except in page length. His last novel, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages long of topics Irving had examined more effectively in earlier novels (inability to speak, restricted growth, trans issues), with a 200-page script in the heart to fill it out – as if extra material were required.

Thus we look at a latest Irving with reservation but still a faint flame of hope, which glows brighter when we learn that Queen Esther – a only four hundred thirty-two pages long – “revisits the setting of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is one of Irving’s very best books, taking place primarily in an institution in St Cloud’s, Maine, operated by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Wells.

The book is a letdown from a novelist who once gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving explored termination and identity with colour, comedy and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a significant work because it left behind the themes that were turning into tiresome tics in his works: wrestling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

This book starts in the fictional town of the Penacook area in the early 20th century, where the Winslow couple welcome teenage ward the title character from the orphanage. We are a several generations prior to the events of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch remains recognisable: even then dependent on anesthetic, adored by his nurses, beginning every address with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in this novel is limited to these early scenes.

The couple are concerned about raising Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish girl discover her identity?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the twenties era. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will join the paramilitary group, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary organisation whose “mission was to protect Jewish towns from hostile actions” and which would later establish the core of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Such are huge themes to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is hardly about St Cloud’s and Dr Larch, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s also not about the main character. For causes that must connect to plot engineering, Esther ends up as a surrogate mother for a different of the couple's offspring, and delivers to a son, the boy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this novel is his story.

And at this point is where Irving’s fixations return strongly, both regular and distinct. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s talk of avoiding the draft notice through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a pet with a significant title (Hard Rain, meet the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, sex workers, novelists and penises (Irving’s passim).

He is a more mundane character than Esther suggested to be, and the minor figures, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are flat also. There are several enjoyable scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a brawl where a few bullies get battered with a support and a bicycle pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has never been a nuanced novelist, but that is not the problem. He has always restated his arguments, telegraphed narrative turns and allowed them to accumulate in the audience's imagination before bringing them to fruition in lengthy, jarring, amusing moments. For case, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to go missing: recall the tongue in The Garp Novel, the digit in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces reverberate through the plot. In this novel, a major person loses an arm – but we merely learn 30 pages later the end.

She returns late in the book, but merely with a eleventh-hour sense of ending the story. We not once learn the entire account of her life in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a author who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – revisiting it together with this novel – yet holds up wonderfully, four decades later. So read the earlier work in its place: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but a dozen times as good.