Did The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas need a sequel?

All the Broken Places
By John Boyne
Doubleday, £20
Reviewed by David Herman

It is more than 15 years since John Boyne published his famous bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006).

The children’s book sold millions of copies worldwide and was made into a successful film in 2008. Both tell the story of two boys, Bruno, the German son of the commandant at Auschwitz, and Shmuel, a Jewish prisoner in the camp. The boys become friends and the novel ends with a twist that readers either find deeply moving or grotesquely sentimental.

The novel generated considerable controversy. Critics attacked it for obscuring the historical reality of the Holocaust and, in particular, for creating a false equivalence between victims and perpetrators.

John Boyne

At the end of the film, the grief of Bruno’s German family encourages the viewer to feel sympathy for Holocaust perpetrators. The leading Holocaust historian David Cesarani wrote in his review, “The story is utterly implausible.

Except for a few peculiar cases there were no Jewish children in the extermination camps: they were gassed on arrival.”

Cesarani called the novel “a distortion of history”. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was published at just the right time, towards the end of a decade of hugely successful novels about the Holocaust that included The Reader (1995), The Pianist (English translation 1999), Everything is Illuminated (2002), The History of Love (2005), and The Book Thief (2005).

Some of these are superb, some are schlock, none more than Boyne’s novel, which turned the Holocaust into sugary sentimentality but has been taught as history in countless classrooms.

Now Boyne has published a sequel, this time for adults, All the Broken Places. In some ways it is better, in other ways it’s just as bad.

It’s better because it’s more grown-up. It takes on big issues about shame, guilt and complicity. How does the daughter of a vicious antisemite come to terms with such a legacy? She was only a child when he committed his terrible crimes but still has to find a way of living with what he did — and what she did.

It is also about secrets. How do people live with their secret past? It is a dark novel about mental illness, suicide attempts and surviving the deaths of people you have loved. It is full of broken lives.

Boyne’s new novel is also much better written than The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It is full of twists and turns and unexpected revelations. It moves back and forward in time, following the life of Bruno’s sister Gretel, after her brother’s death in Auschwitz.

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A poster for the film adaptation of John Boyne's book

She moves to France, then Australia, and finally, to Britain, where she settles in a flat in Mayfair with her historian husband and later encounters the mysterious neighbours downstairs.

But there are weaknesses too. There are too many melodramatic revelations. Above all, there are familiar problems from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

There are scenes with Shmuel, the Jewish boy in Auschwitz, and moving encounters with two Jews devastated by the loss of so many loved ones during the Holocaust.

But the fact remains that it’s the Nazi commandant’s daughter, Gretel, who is the central character and who we are meant to sympathise with. Boyne disputes this. He writes: “I am not trying to create a sympathetic character in Gretel.”

But this is exactly what he does. Too often other parts of the story are just a distraction from what should be its real emotional focus.

It is time for publishers to think long and hard about whose suffering is a proper subject for fiction. The great Holocaust novels are about the real victims, not about the sound of cash registers.