The sun may be shining this Monday at the end of March in Dublin, we do not expect to find the writer John Boyne, with the tanned complexion and the calm air of the vacationer. Shouldn’t he be pale, haggard, thrashing around? After all, he is expected at the turn. Because the Irish writer publishes this Wednesday at Lattès the sequel to his overwhelming bestseller, The boy in the striped pajamassold six million copies, adapted to the cinema, and studied in all the schools of the world.
The boy in the striped pajamas, it is an extraordinary youth novel where the Shoah is told through the eyes of a child. And not just anyone, because Bruno happens to be the son of a senior Nazi official, responsible for the horrors of Auschwitz. A true master of suspense and narration, the Irish writer has the art of tilting the outcome and leaving the reader with as many questions as answers.
The continuation of this story, which therefore appears 17 years after the first part, is entitled Life on the run. VShis novel is written not for children, but for adults. Gretel, Bruno’s big sister, who has become a very old lady, recounts her life in secrecy and lies, hidden in the four corners of the globe, and the feeling of guilt that has never left her.
From Ireland to Australia
Still, we envy the tranquility of John Boyne that afternoon, upstairs in an Irish pub in the bustling city center of the Irish capital. Tasting a salad washed down with a pint of beer – you’re Irish or you’re not – he explains to us that he’s just returned from Australia, where he’s been twenty times over the past few years. The sources of his inspiration, he draws them on this island a little larger than his native Ireland. “People always think that an Irish writer is necessarily influenced by James Joyce. For my part, I have never read Ulysses “, he confides with a smile a bit embarrassed.
His rested face is therefore explained by this Australian trip, which was not a vacation. John Boyne makes it a point of honor to write every day, for several hours, “until you have the feeling of having reached the end of something”. What attracts him to Australia, he himself cannot say too much. “The climate”, he says, more lenient than the biting cold of Dublin in winter, whatever his character Gretel says, who tried, in vain, to escape his past.
Gretel was then in her twenties. She flees Paris where she lived in hiding with her mother after the fall of the Reich. The two women had tried to pretend that they were French, but the Parisians had ended up finding out everything. And Gretel embarks, alone, for the end of the world. For a time, she lives in peace. Then one day, in a bar in Sydney, she thinks she recognizes someone she had known in “the other place” – Bruno, her missing brother, thus nicknamed the concentration camp. And she must flee again, and again try to shove everything under the rug.
“Books that make people cry”
Years later, having become an old lady, Gretel is forced to dive back into her story. New neighbors show up in her apartment building: a young woman frightened by her husband, a famous movie director, and their nine-year-old son. The detail is not trivial. Nine years old is the age of Bruno, Gretel’s brother, in The boy in the striped pajamas. John Boyne multiplies the links between the two texts to tell this past that does not pass.
But life on the run is a novel that goes much further than The boy in the striped pajamas. It is a profound and beautiful text about how the dead and intimate tragedies continue to haunt the living, including, at times, taking the form of ghosts. Because among other funny coincidences, the little neighbor is reading Bruno’s favorite novel. The novel is not a fantasy novel, strictly speaking, but John Boyne “likes to borrow from other genres”, he confides.
And it was an opportunity to make the reader feel the terrible fear in which Gretel lives. “There are two things that are very hard in literature: to make people laugh, and to scare them”, assures John Boyne. And tongue-in-cheek, to add: “It’s not so hard to make them cry… And I’ve written a lot of books that make people cry”. This one, which takes its reader through a myriad of emotions, succeeds in a bit of all three.
Imagining is “terrifying”
The writer demonstrates in this new work many other talents. For example, John Boyne made his specialty the very meticulous description of societies. In life on the run, his favorite themes are always present. Homosexuality in the 1950s, for example, with the character of a young Irishwoman exiled in Australia. She has been the victim of horrific discrimination in her past, and can hardly imagine that her roommate Gretel’s secret is more terrible and shameful than her own.
On the other hand, as The boy in the striped pajamas, life on the run is a book that testifies to the intelligence with which John Boyne uses language. If Gretel has become at the end of the novel the old English lady that she has so long pretended to be, at the beginning of the text she has a hesitant and vague way of speaking. First, she must not give herself away with her German accent. But above all, she does not have the words to confess the immensity of the guilt she feels.
His brother, years earlier and in the previous book, hadn’t been able to recount the assassination of Pavel, a Jewish servant, by Lieutenant Kurt either. “Bruno is so traumatized, upset that he doesn’t have the language to say it, so it’s not on the page”, describes John Boyne. He adds: “This is something that is even more terrifying for the reader, especially the young reader: he has to imagine. “For seventeen years, this is a question that comes up when he presents the book in schools: “I am always asked: ”But what is happening to Pavel?”. I return the question to the schoolchildren: ”In your opinion, what happened?” When one is a writer, one does not always have to write everything in full, one must also rely on the reader’s imagination. »