Written as a sequel to THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMA, of which 11 million copies were sold, John Boyne first conceived the idea for ALL THE BROKEN PLACES in 2004, shortly after completing the final draft of THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMA, and I knew immediately that I would write it one day. (p. 369).But it took him another few years and the lockdown of the pandemic to do so. He has succeeded in writing another good book, though not quite as good as its origin.
Boyne places the devil’s daughter Gretel in the centre of the novel. Even though, after finishing the book, I got the impression that it’s rather her brother who dominates the plot. Together with Gretel we witness her flight to Paris in 1946, where she and her mother get victims of a few French charmeurs. The reader can guess however, that at that stage of the book, their razorblades won’t be used to cut German throats, but only…
In her pleading for mercy her brother appears in her trauma: He was here at last. My brother. Trapped for ever at nine years of age, wearing his favourite shorts, a white shirt and a blue jumper. He had been standing in the centre of the group, throughout it all, watching me, and he approached me now with no emotion on his face. (p. 111). On her next stage, In Australia , Gretel meets her first love from “that place”, the former lieutenant Kurt Kostler again, a civil servant to her father, the commandant of the concentration camp in “Out-With”, as her brother called it.
Then she comes back to London and falls in love with a Jew. Again, after a reciprocal series of confessions, admissions there is no retribution, but their relationship breaks into pieces. Again and again, she has to hide her origin, her real self: Tell a story often enough and it becomes the truth. (p. 173)
Eight decades after running away from “that place” it takes a new resident in her house to drive her to finally admit all the failures of her past. And that is what is the content of the book: It is a novel about guilt, complicity and grief, a book that sets out to examine how culpable a young person might be, given the historical events unfolding around her, and whether such a person ever cleanse themselves of the crimes committed by the people she loved. (p.370)
Style: Boyne manages to introduce meaningful titles, such as:
THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER: In her argumentative conversation with Kurt later, she complains about being born into her family and especially into that time, but she repents, whereas the former soldiers regrets what could have become with the Reich.
THE FENCE: The author re-constructs a scene which parallels the central act in the plot in his most famous novel. This time it is Gretel’s son and not her brother who slips through the fence.
BEAUTIFUL SCARS: Outer remnants of the French treatment mirror those inner injuries that go much deeper: I should never forget my part in the horror, for my culpability was scarred just as deeply into my soul as those numbers were upon Miss A’s arm.( p. 283)
THE BOY:It’s not only Shmuel, but also her brother, whose name she daren’t say; and moreover there is also Henry, the nine-year-old boy who comes to live in the flat below hers. These three boys are personified and make the dramatic core of the plot. The latter sets Gretel’s remorse (6 years of war, countless millions of deaths and all the broken places that had been left behind, p.194) into action and helps her to at least partly redeem herself. She decides to fight evil… The question that remains: Can she erase the past with her act?
THE FINAL SOLUTION: A dire pun on what happened to the Jews and to what Gretel does in the end.
Apart from the titles that stick so well to the plot, shifts in time between the chapters accelerate the reading. But to my gusto JB has a bit exaggerated with the minor characters, especially Heidi Hargrave, who turns out to be…., and also Eleanor, her son’s fourth wife comes in handy. She advises the old lady on what to do in the Darcy-Witt affair. The fact that inflections from my past occasionally burst through to threaten my safety (p.40), i.e. the reader becomes part of Gretel’s constant fear of being detected, set an atmosphere of constant angst: The panic, the dread, the fear of what was to come. (p.58)
This may lessen the tension which we had in THE BOY…. Furtermore the plot is more foreseeable here, but the sequel is worth reading even though it doesn’t equal its predecessor in tragedy.
