02 Dec / The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
Given the somber subject matter of this title, I realize this probably verges on sacrilegious, but no disrespect is intended in any way … Allow me to start with a link to a sarcastically funny video: “So You Want to Write a Novel.” In it is a mention of today’s date, December 4 (serendipitous timing), as the would-be novelist muses about getting his book out in time for the holiday rush (HA!).
That comment indirectly links back to this book: author John Boyne reveals in an interview with his original publisher, David Fickling (the interview is available as an audible download and in the “movie tie-in” paperback edition), that “pretty much about a week and a half after I sat down to write the opening lines, you [were] reading it at your office in Oxford [UK].” Boyne does clarify that the book took another year to shape it into the version we hold in our hands, but holy moly (!) – 1.5 weeks to write a first draft good enough to send to the publisher! So if you really want to be a novelist (an award-winning, bestselling one at that!), go find John Boyne!
Striped Pajamas is both an eye-opener and a heart-breaker. The year is 1943, and 9-year-old Bruno is the youngest child of a German family whose lives are uprooted when the father’s career takes a surprising turn and the family is sent to live at “Out-With.” Their rather bleak new house stands all alone, except for a distant fenced-in enclosure that Bruno can see from his bedroom window, where small figures move around all dressed up in what looks to be striped pajamas.
Even in – or perhaps because of – wartime, Bruno is an insulated, naive child. He thinks “Heil Hitler” is not unlike saying,”well, goodbye for now, have a pleasant afternoon” since all the soldiers use it as they take their leave. He’s aware that “the Fury” is the force that controls their lives, but he’s also “the rudest guest Bruno had ever witnessed.” When Bruno finally asks his impressively uniformed father – “Commandant” to everyone outside the family – about the pajama-clad figures, he’s told, “Those people well, they’re not people at all.” And yet, Bruno will soon dare to go out exploring and come upon “the dot that became a speck that became a blob that became a boy” named Schmuel who will one day become his “best friend for life.”
Boyne impressively weaves a sense of make-believe throughout his story, as if saying that something so inhumanely horrific as the Holocaust could not have possibly happened … and yet it did, and keeps happening again and again. When Bruno initially sees the prisoners from afar, he is innocently reminded of the dress-up family plays directed by his beloved grandmother, who proves to be the only brave voice of disgust exposing her son’s complicity with “the Fury.” When she dies, the veneer of pretend is eradicated, as the grandfather escapes into dementia and tragedy subsumes Bruno’s family.
My only whinge with the story is wisely addressed in the interview mentioned above (well worth the listen or read in full). To any complaint that Bruno could not possibly have been so innocently naive, Boyne responds, “We’re reading books from a twenty-first century point of view, with all that we’ve read about a subject, all we’ve seen in movies, all we’ve heard in the news. And we expect that everybody always knew what we know now.” Touché indeed, Mr. Boyne.
Now if only he had the answer to why, in spite of all that 20/20 21st-century hindsight, do these genocidal tragedies keep happening over and over again …?
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2006