Scala Radio Book Club: All The Broken Places by John Boyne
The sequel to The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas
In the Scala Radio Book Club, Mark greeted John Boyne to discuss All The Broken Places, the long-awaited sequel to the phenomenal global bestseller, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
All The Broken Places is the sequel to The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas which follows the child protagonist Bruno, who doesn’t know anything about the Final Solution or the Holocaust. All he knows is that his family have moved from their home in Berlin to a desolate area where there’s no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a friendship that has devastating consequences.
All The Broken Places is set nearly eighty years later, Bruno’s sister Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget.
Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago. Back then, her complicity dishonoured her life, but to interfere now could risk revealing the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting.
Mark opened the interview by asking: ‘This novel is a sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I wonder how much of that story a reader needs to know before beginning this.’
‘Well, it stands as an independent book on its own. And I always think even if you write a sequel, it should work on its own merits. But for readers of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, they will remember Gretel, who was Bruno's older sister in that book, and at the end of that book, she's 12 years old and is left traumatized by the events of that story.’
‘And I'd always wanted to revisit her to know what it would be like to be in her position. The daughter of a Camp Commandant during the Holocaust. So, I revisit her today in 2022, when she's 91 years old and is looking back at a life that has been filled with regrets, shame and guilt, and a sense of complicity in the events of that time. And we also revisit some of the years in between as well. It was nice to return to that family and finish Gretel's story and see what might have become of her.’
Mark asked John about the central character the story, Gretel: ‘Gretel is not a straightforward person, and the book is about guilt, complicity, grief, and culpability. How do you think Gretel should be judged?’
‘I try to write characters, in my books that are somewhat ambiguous. I think in real life most of us are neither saints nor villains. We're somewhere in between. And Gretel is certainly like that. She's not responsible for anything that happened during the Holocaust itself because she was just a child. However, one thing she is responsible for and that she's challenged on several times during the book is the fact that when the camps were liberated, rather than giving information to the allies and liberators on what took place, information, which could have been of use to families of the victims or the survivors even. She decided to change her name, flee, and take no further part in involving herself in the study of that subject. And she knows as she got older that that was a mistake, that actually she should have given that information, it could have been useful. And she is looking for a moment in her life where perhaps she can find some atonement for that, and circumstances in the book in 2022 offer her that moment.’
‘But I think it's down to the reader then as they read the book, there'll be moments where you like Gretel, moments where you dislike her, moments where you can understand what she did at that time, and moments where you disapprove of it. And I think that's what makes for interesting characters and books that hopefully you might want to share with a friend, and talk about the moral questions at the centre of it.’
Mark asked John: ‘For many younger readers, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is their introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust, which is quite a weight to sit on your shoulders. How do you feel about that?’
‘Yes, and it's a strange one because of course a novelist doesn't write a schoolbook or a textbook. We write novels. This one is deliberately subtitled, a fable, a work of fiction with a moral at the centre. I'm always conscious of the fact that if it's used in schools, I hope that teachers make it clear to students the difference between the fictional world that I've created and the real world. It's something that I've tried to do very much in all my school visits over the years, and I must have been to at least 700 schools, I would say, around the world over the years. And I always do try to get that across to kids. But I do think if it sparks an interest in them, if it makes them want to go on and learn more and read more and watch documentaries and really educate themselves on what happened during the Holocaust, then I think that's something I can feel quite proud of.’
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