'The Cider House Rules' by John Irving

This is another chunkster of a novel hitting a notable birthday this summer. Published in 1985, it runs to 700 pages in my paperback edition, and like 'The Way We Live Now' it is a highly engaging page-turner which also manages to be thought-provoking.

This novel is set in Maine, principally between the 1920s and the 1950s, and has at its heart a discourse about the merits of terminating a pregnancy when a child is unwanted and would otherwise grow up as an orphan.

Abortion was, of course, at this time illegal in America though widely practiced. The book is, though, no polemic. You are left to make your own mind up about the underlying issues while enjoying a rather original and well-told story.

The central characters are an eccentric, if well-meaning, doctor called Wilbur Larch, who runs an orphanage located deep in the countryside, and one of the orphans, Homer Wells, who he loves as a son and wants to succeed him. He carries out abortions at the orphanage too, where he is assisted by three (later four) devoted nurses and does battle with a board of governors who keep trying to exercise unwanted oversight. We follow Homer through his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood.

In the second half of the book he moves away from the orphanage and starts a new life living with a well-to-do family who run an orchard and cider-making business near the coast. There is also a fantastic secondary character called Melony, another orphan, but one who grows up to have a very different future from Homer.

The setting and subject matter make this very memorable. It did, for me, slightly lose momentum in the final hundred pages or so, and there is an element of the plot involving the creation of a fictional identity for an orphan who died as a young child, that I found stretched credulity somewhat. And how many times in a lifetime can someone read 'David Copperfield', 'Great Expectations' and 'Jane Eyre' without getting just a tad bored by them?

Some of the metaphors are a little clumsy for my taste and the book also seemed to me to be poorly edited at points. We have a character, for example, in the 1930s referring to his time fighting in 'The First World War' and there is the odd typo too. But the paperback, published by Black Swan, is so lovely to handle with smooth paper and attractive, largish print, that all this can be forgiven. It absolutely deserves its reputation as a modern classic.