Demob Happy

John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

I’m naturally suspicious of the recent glut of novels marketed as children’s literature for adults (see ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ and ‘The Life of Pi’), but this is a darker proposition. The Holocaust makes for a particularly poignant subject for John Boyne’s ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, a novella told from the perspective of a naive nine year old German, Bruno, whose father is a concentration camp commander. The climax will seem to readers either overly predictable or horrifyingly inevitable - I fell into the second category: while I certainly saw the ending coming, and had built up a fair head of cynicism during the course of the story, found myself moved at the last nonetheless.

Bruno’s childish naivety recalls comparable characterisations of blindness and self-denial in the World War II-based works of Kazuo Ishiguro: the gentleman detective of ‘When We Were Orphans‘, or the unquestioning butler in ‘Remains of the Day‘. Bruno’s blindness is almost harder to give credence than that of the narrator in the former: Bruno may be a rather sheltered and spoilt nine year old but his ignorance sometimes stretches the boundaries of credibility. The novel reminded me in part of the film ‘Life is Beautiful’, in which an Italian Jew creates the elaborate illusion for his son that life in the concentration camp is in fact a contest to win a tank. This conceit was echoed in turn by ‘Goodbye Lenin’: a young man is impelled to create an illusive reality around his infirm mother to convince her that communism is still alive following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bruno, however, is not subject to any particularly elaborate ruse to shield him from the truth, other than an unfailing belief in the sound judgement of his father and the propagandist line that “Germany is the greatest of all countries”. Rather, Bruno is unable to countenance - much like the anachronistic protagonists of Ishiguro’s novels - the fullness and complexity of evil in the world. In the case of ”The Boy with the striped Pyjamas’, it’s an exterminating evil that lies just on the other side of a fence: the kind of perimeter that children typically explore first. A quick read with lasting impact.