John Irving on faith and miracles and his new novel

American novelist John Irving has explored everyday miracles in books like A Prayer For Owen Meany, Cider House Rules and The Fourth Hand.

His latest novel, Avenue of Mysteries, is no different.

It tells two stories in parallel: In the past, Juan Diego is 14, living in a dump in Mexico with his sister Lupe; and in the future, Juan Diego is 54, a beloved novelist living and teaching in Iowa, on his way to the Philippines to make good on a promise he made years before.

While in town for a Vancouver Writers' Fest event on Wednesday, Irving stopped by CBC Vancouver for a conversation with On The Coast host Stephen Quinn.

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I want to start in the past, with 14-year-old Juan Diego and his younger sister Lupe. Tell me about the time you spent travelling through Mexico for this book. What did you see there that you just had to get down on the page?

I was struck by the children who do the picking and sorting in the dumps. This is no less true today than it was in 1970, when the Mexican part of the novel is set. The kids are still the ones to do the sorting and the separating, the glass, the copper, the aluminum, the plastics.

They wear thick rubber boots for the most part to protect them from discarded syringes. It's just interesting to see children working there. Often their parents or relatives were themselves dump children before them. Niños de la basura, they're called: Children of the rubbish.

It just interested me. The subject of children at risk is not a new one to me. Similar in risk is the circuses and how children are used in Mexican circuses, quite similar to India in this respect. The high-wire acts are often performed by child acrobats. In most circuses there are no safety nets.

Juan Diego and Lupe live in this world, that, dark as it is, is brimming with miracles. Tell me about the role of faith in this world.

I've always been interested in the discrepancy between the miracles on which most religions are founded, which have always appealed to me, and the man-made rules of the church, or you could say, any institution, and how they disappoint and pale in comparison to the miracles that make people believe or want to believe.

These children are virgin shopping in Oaxaca, a very easy thing to do in Mexico because there's more than one virgin who is deserving of your religious attention. There's of course the Virgin Mary, there's Our Lady of Guadalupe, there's the Soledad Virgin as she's called.

These kids are skeptical of what these virgins can do now. They want them to prove themselves, do something new. As disparaging as they are about the Virgin Mary, the principal miracle is delivered by none other than her.

The title of the novel, Avenue of Mysteries, refers to a street in Mexico City, Avenida de los Misterios, the street the pilgrims take to Guadalupe's shrine. So the mysteries of the title are indeed religious mysteries, but there are other mysteries, of birth, of parentage, of sex, of mysterious figures who travel with Juan Diego.

Juan Diego's younger sister Lupe has some form of clairvoyance. You've done this before, with Owen Meany, and Lilly from Hotel New Hampshire. But with Lupe, everything that happens in this book is set in motion by what she sees or imagines she sees. Is that not a terrible burden to give a 13 year old?

It is a terrible burden for any child to have. Lupe, as her brother says, is better at the past than she is at the future. She's usually dead right about what's happened to you without you even telling her. But in her case, Lupe does believe she sees her own future and her brother's.

The temptation of course, in a child's mind, is if that future she foresees is terrible enough, what might you do or what could you do to change it? Whether she's right or not is one of the novel's mysteries.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

To hear the full interview, click the audio labelled: American novelist John Irving on his new novel's fascination with miracles