This is yet another brilliant book from John Boyne. I found it involving, very moving and an engrossing read. It is a sort of sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, but although reference is made to events in that book, this works fine as a stand-alone.
All The Broken Places is at heart a study of guilt – which makes it sound worthy and turgid, but I found it nothing of the sort, but an involving, page-turning read. We meet Gretel Fernsby, now a respectable 93-year-old widow living in Mayfair but who was the daughter of a concentration camp Kommandant and in whom the guilt of her supposed complicity in her father’s monstrous crimes still burns. The arrival of a new set of neighbours involuntarily takes her back to that time and she is eventually presented with the possibility of atonement, but at great personal cost.
The narrative, in Gretel’s first-person voice, switches between the present and past events in places she has lived – escaped to, in reality. Boyne judges it to perfection, so that her stories emerge naturally and those things which made the woman she is now come together completely plausibly. All this is in excellent, readable prose which just carried me along throughout.
The blurb makes much of the question of how guilty Gretel really is, but the book is more subtle than that. Boyne understands that whether or not the guilt is justified, it exists in the minds of others and in Gretel’s own mind, and it is this that keeps her always having to lie and evade – and possibly face danger or flight. Whatever her past, I found Gretel a rather sympathetic character, which is quite some achievement given that members of my family died in the camps. It is also worth saying that Boyne treats the subject of the Holocaust with respect and thoughtfulness but without the excessive reverence many writers feel it requires, and is a world away from the exploitative use of the Holocaust by some writers to lend spurious gravitas to otherwise mediocre books. I think it’s perfectly judged.
All The Broken Places can be emotionally bruising at times, but it’s never a difficult read and I was gripped throughout. I can recommend it very warmly.
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