[Werthead]

Lame.

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Bruno is a nine-year-old boy living in Berlin who is happy going to school and playing with his friends. When his father gets a new job, their family has to move to a place called 'Out-With', a cold and desolate place in the country, where Bruno and his sister Gretel have to be tutored at home. Ignoring warnings to remain close to the house, Bruno explores the edges of the huge wired-off camp next to their house and meets a boy named Shmuel who lives on the other side of the fence, with whom he becomes friends.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is an un-researched, wholly unbelievable and rather insulting novel. John Boyne writes his book in an extremely earnest tone, using the horrors and misery of the Holocaust to...I'm not sure what actually. The book is extremely short (210 pages of extremely large type and unusually narrow margins) and appears to be completely bereft of any kind of point. Bruno moves next to Auschwitz (but doesn't know what it is), moans about leaving his friends behind, meets a Jewish boy and they swap some illuminating stories (except they aren't) and there's a few knowing moments when adult readers can work out some nasty things are going on off-page and then it ends on a note so contrived and unbelievable it is borderline comedic.

The book is based around a series of lies. A nine-year-old boy growing up in Berlin in 1943 would be close to the age for entering the Hitler Youth (by this stage compulsory) and would have been educated at school about the 'evils' of Judaism. The notion that a nine-year-old boy in Nazi Germany wouldn't know what a Jew was or that there was even a war on is completely farcical. His twelve-year-old sister definitely would, as she would be a member of the League of German Girls (the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth) and by this point would be pretty heavily indoctrinated in National Socialism. The idea that the daughter of a senior military official and someone personally earmarked for greatness by Hitler himself (who has dinner at the family house at one point in the book) would evade this compulsory service is also inconceivable. The notion that a prisoner of Auschwitz would be able to spend hours on end, day after day, talking to someone through a fence without a single guard or other prisoner noticing is also fundamentally unbelievable.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (*) is a book that the author conceived of and wrote apparently in a deliberate effort to be worthy and artistic, but then did no research for the book (apparently written over a single weekend; it shows, badly) at all, making elementary errors that even the most casual student of WWII, Nazi and Jewish history will pick up on immediately. This is that most pitiful of books, a contrived narrative that makes an attempt to deliberately tug at the heartstrings by employing a real-life horror to make up for the writer's lack of ability. Definitely one to be avoided.

[Aptorian]

Better or worse than Terry Goodkinds - Soul of the Fire?

[Astra]

I really liked the movie.

[Abyss]

I don't agree with Wert on this one.
He's absolutely right about the historic liberties (or maybe omissions is a better word) the author took with Nazi Germany and Auschwitz at that time, but none of it is so completely far out that it detracts from the story, provided you approach it for what it is: a story about an unlikely friendship between two boys on opposite sides of the Holocaust. You could rationalize away the inconsistencies if you choose - Hitler cut his favourites all kinds of liberties, including exempting their kids, and actualy, at no point does Shmule say 'we're jews!', and Bruno is self-involved/naive enough not to have made that connection - but they don't really go to the point of the story.

I thought the length/font/format worked for the same reason. The book might take a slow reader a few hours. I didn't want to spend more time than that in it - it's an interesting read and worthwhile, but not something i would spend days and weeks working my way through.

The obvious, tho far more intelligent, comparison is the film Life is Beautiful - spend five minutes thinking about it and it registers as impossible and implausible in light of what went on in even the least horrific death/labour camps, but as a work taken on its own merit it's pretty impressive.

So not a brilliant book, not the cleverest thing ever written about an ugly event in history, but one that's worth an hour or two of read time.

[Soultaken]

I disagree. Sure, its historically inaccurate and improbable but I believe the author's attempt was to take a different perspective to a dark and widely covered subject. Not sure if you read it based on a recommendation, I can see why it would be disappointing in that case.

[Werthead]

Abyss, on 09 March 2010 - 02:56 PM, said:

He's absolutely right about the historic liberties (or maybe omissions is a better word) the author took with Nazi Germany and Auschwitz at that time, but none of it is so completely far out that it detracts from the story, provided you approach it for what it is: a story about an unlikely friendship between two boys on opposite sides of the Holocaust.

There are many other ways this could have been done without trying to trivialize the subject matter, however. One way would have been to have had Bruno knowing who the Jews were from the start and having preconceptions that were eroded by meeting Schmuel (put in the house as a manservant, a more convincing way for Bruno to meet him than the whole fence thing). The other way would have been to have them as friends in pre-segregation Germany, than them being separated and maybe meeting up later on when Schmuel was in the concentration camp. Either of these approaches would have allowed the author to still get to the point he was trying to make.

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You could rationalize away the inconsistencies if you choose - Hitler cut his favourites all kinds of liberties, including exempting their kids, and actualy, at no point does Shmule say 'we're jews!', and Bruno is self-involved/naive enough not to have made that connection - but they don't really go to the point of the story.

Actually, Schmuel does say this at one point, and Bruno ponders what this means.

This also fails to explain how Bruno, who starts the book living in Berlin in 1943, does not know there's a war on. By this point Germany has already lost the Battle of Stalingrad and all of its major cities, including Berlin, are being bombed nightly by the RAF and USAF.