All The Broken Places: The Sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

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Of course, commercial publishing has always responded to reader trends, and these days can rush out similar novels as fast as high street fashion reproduces copycat catwalk looks. Boyne hopes today’s ambitious debut novels by young writers “can be retrieved once publishing becomes courageous once again”. John Boyne studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He is now the author of 21 books. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill When Gretel witnesses a violent argument between Henry’s mother and his domineering father, she is faced with a chance to make amends for her guilt, grief and remorse and act to save a young boy. But by doing this she would be forced to reveal her true identity to the world and could cost her dearly.

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas”…..which was first published in 2006: a best selling popular international book of ‘fiction’. …a children’s fable about a boy whose father is a Commandant in the German army during WWII, under the regime of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler. …. They feel unfairly guilty as they didn’t commit any crimes themselves but feel swept up with those who committed crimes,” says Boyne, during our Zoom call. “Gretel’s whole life has been tarnished by the actions of someone else: she feels she can’t excuse herself, but also feels ‘I have nothing to excuse myself for’.” Over years, I have helped a number of young and new writers and what I have discovered, to my disappointment, is that they will all turn on you when the crowd turns on you,” he said. “Writers I considered friends, whom I trusted, who turned on me in difficult moments and refused to use their voice to tell the world who I actually am and who the social media world pretends I am. That level of cowardice and betrayal disappoints me the most.” I told myself that none of it had been my fault, that I had been just a child, but there was that small part of my brain that asked me, if I was entirely innocent, then why was I living under an assumed name?”

All The Broken Places

Making art about the Holocaust is morally fraught, as the artist has an obligation both to memorialise and to teach. That is what the subject demands, if you want to be seemly. If you want to be unseemly, please yourself. If you really want to know about boys in Auschwitz, there are two memoirs: If This Is a Man by Primo Levi and Night by Elie Wiesel. But immutable truth is hard. You might not want it on your bedside table. So, instead, there’s a tendency to vagary and whimsy; to mythology and to distance; to being unable to conceal your greater interest in Nazis than your interest in their victims (and Boyne cannot); to reading Anne Frank’s diary, a book about the Holocaust that omits the Holocaust; to this. Given his own success, could he help champion these young writers? With a sigh, it becomes clear he believes he has tried. The author asks the question: What would you have done in twelve-year-old Gretel's shoes? Would you have alerted the authorities once the war was over? Did she turn a blind eye and pretend it wasn't happening? And with the death of her brother, did she pay a high enough price? When someone makes a mistake early in her young life, is she doomed for the rest of her days - can she be forgiven? Gretel insists to Kurt that she doesn’t wish the Allies had lost the war, despite the personal advantages she would have gained. Kurt doesn’t believe her: “You’re lying. . . . You are. I can see it in your face. You need to tell yourself that you wouldn’t so you can feel a sense of moral superiority, but I don’t believe you for even a moment” (253). Do you believe Gretel? Later, when Alex Darcy-Witt suggests that Gretel wishes Germany had won the war, she responds, “No one wins a war” (355). Why do you think she answers differently this time? There are few functioning families within the novel: everyone is affected by the reach of war, its tendrils stretching across the planet and through time. Warped parent/child relationships range from the apparently trivial (Gretel’s greedy son wants her to sell her luxurious flat) to the truly monstrous. Gretel’s mother, we learn, remained a true believer in nazism until the end. In the present-day plot strand, the film producer’s abuse of his family threatens to erupt into tragedy. Henry is a ghost-like figure, reminding Gretel both of her dead brother and of her failures as a mother.

Boyne delivers a seemingly redundant adult sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas...Boyne creates vivid characters, but a certain thematic obviousness dilutes the dramatic effect. Fans of the first book may enjoy revisiting the material as adults, but this doesn't quite land on its own." - Publishers Weekly Revisiting this fictional wartime family lures readers into tangled webs of inter-generational trauma which remain even today. Family silence Mr Richardson and I had enjoyed the perfect neighbourly relationship in that we had not exchanged a single word since 2008.”I found this book interesting but it did not get under my skin as the first book did. It probably did not help that I am becoming increasingly tired of the alternate chapter/timeline set up. I long for an historical fiction book which begins at the beginning and progresses through to the end in one continuous line!