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 [...]

[Read more →]

The stuff of nightmares
9/10
Jung Chang’s autobiographical story of three generations of women living through China’s tumultuous 20th century is fascinating and terrifying. Given that it is a subjective account of the key events in modern Chinese history, ‘Wild Swans‘ provides a compelling and informative narrative that brings to life complex socio-historic transformations in [...]

[Read more →]

Reading of responsibility
9/10
The Reader is a subtle, thought-provoking work that continues - but does not quite belong to - a tradition of Holocaust literature. The novel very cleverly raises questions about the nature of complicity and the boundaries of responsibility. It also examines the idea of collective ‘amnesia’ and its consquential twin, collective guilt. It [...]

[Read more →]

Remains of Old Europe
9/10
‘Remains of the Day‘ is a subtle, thought-provoking work, and perhaps Anthony Hopkins’ all-time best performance. He plays Stevens, a career butler at the service of Lord Darlington, a Nazi appeaser who uses his diplomatic influences to promote cross-cultural ties with Germany in the early 1930s. Stevens is a dutiful servant and [...]

[Read more →]

Elementary
6/10
Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans revisits the classically English detective novel, mimicking and deliberately undermining the style of authors like Agatha Christie. It uses this simple subtext to show how the global catastrophe of the second world war finally destroyed the quaint notion that evil and criminality could be overcome by logic and reason. Whereas [...]

[Read more →]