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 [...]

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Dignity and denial - the noble art of butlering
In a comment on my post reviewing ‘When we Were Orphans‘, John Self of Asylum pointed out that many of Ishiguro’s novels are about ‘blindness’. While that novel has not warmed on me, it was with ‘blindness’ in mind that I read ‘Remains of the Day’, also [...]

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Letters from Iwo Jima
7.5/10
The main obstacle to engaging with Clint Eastwood’s admirable ‘Letters From Iwo Jima‘ is the saturation of battle imagery in modern cinema. This is a front-line war film which, while dealing with notions of memory, compassion, cowardice and honour, takes place largely on the battlefield. From the misguidedly mawkish ‘Saving Private [...]

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History, narrative, truth and fiction
9/10
Atonement is a stunning period melodrama adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name. Directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) from a script by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, The Quiet American), it slips comfortably into a canon of great historical dramas from those of Merchant-Ivory to Anthony Minghella’s The [...]

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