His latest book, though, is much simpler than those historical thrillers. It’s written for children and is set in another place Boyne hasn’t been: Auschwitz.
The compact tale is about two nine-year-old boys — the son of the Nazi commandant who runs the concentration camp, and a Polish Jew interned there — who become unlikely friends when they meet through a wire fence.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has already been shortlisted for a prestigious book prize and is being translated into a dozen languages, which prompts inevitable comparisons with a recent runaway bestseller, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The two books share the same editor and publisher, and have the same crossover appeal for adult and child readers. Haddon appears to have whetted the appetite of a public ravenous for a certain type of children’s writing: simple stories, simply told, with bigger moral messages. Why else would a shocked Boyne find his name in Heat magazine, the celeb-watching beauty parlour staple? “The two books are nothing alike,” says the mild-mannered Dubliner. “I love that book; I think it’s a masterpiece. But the only thing they have in common is that they’re about a little boy.”
But the authors also share a willingness to tackle difficult subject matter, with Haddon’s book shaped by its narrator’s autism. Boyne says he did not plan in advance to write about the Holocaust, and that doing so would be offensively presumptuous for a writer without personal connections to it.
While he had previously read memoirs by Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi, Boyne was surprised to be struck by the idea of boys becoming friends through a concentration-camp fence. He started writing one morning in the voice of a nine-year-old and didn’t stop until he had finished the story two days later.
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“It was one of those strange experiences where you just get an idea and run with it. You don’t need to sleep, you just write. I’d never had it before and I haven’t had it since,” he says. “I just knew that if I stopped then and went back to rewrite a chapter, or if I stopped to think about it too much, I’d lose that tone, I’d lose the charm of his voice, and the story would fall apart. I still feel now when I look back on it that it’ s very fragile.”
That was nearly two years ago. It took more than 10 drafts and plenty of research for the tale of Bruno and Schmuel to reach its published form. And its grown-up appeal happened almost as an afterthought.
“I decided it would be written as a children’s book, through a nine-year-old’s eyes. But because there are so many misunderstandings from Bruno’s point of view, it had all these other layers that adults seem to enjoy as well,” Boyne says. “Publishers are very keen to find those kind of books, but it’s not something that you can set out to do.”
The novel mostly tells the story of Bruno, whose life is upended when his family moves from their posh five-storey house in Berlin to a grim place surrounded by fences that he cannot understand. Bruno never manages to pronounce its name correctly — the word never appears in the book — so he calls the place “Out-With”. Everything is grey and there’s nobody for him to play with, until he goes exploring and finds a thin boy called Schmuel, who is wearing striped pyjamas and sitting on the other side of the wire fence.
The meeting that begins their secret friendship takes place after the book’s halfway mark. The remainder recounts Bruno’s daily life and his memories of Berlin before his father’s job forced the family to move to the camp. Boyne took a few liberties with facts to suit his story: the house was inside the border fence at Auschwitz, but the camp’s commandant did move his family there, according to the author.
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“He brought his wife, he brought his children, and thought it was a suitable place for children to live. You would assume he was a man who loved his family; people generally do. But you would wonder what was going through his mind,” says Boyne. Readers can hazard a guess at the family dynamic Bruno observes. The result is an intimate domestic portrait and a glimpse of how decision-makers and historical figures affect those closest to them.
Bruno is puzzled when Gretel, his older sister, stops playing with dolls and grows interested in the maps of Europe on her bedroom wall. He has telling conversations with the servants, who look over their shoulders before speaking, and even then never seem to reveal the whole truth. Such observations offer adult readers a new perspective on historical events, especially given Bruno’s naivety. He fails to understand why people are on the other side of the fence, who they are, or even that events in a world beyond his household can influence his own life.
“There are times when Bruno’s naivety is a little bit put on,” Boyne says. “As it goes on, he’s a little bit more wise to what’s happening and he doesn’t want to confront it. He doesn’t want to recognise what his father is doing; he doesn’t want to feel that he’s part of this.
“I tried not to do the obvious and just make them into cartoon Nazis and start demonising people,” he says. “It’s more of a human story than that. A little boy doesn’t hate his father, isn’t going to demonise him. We are, as the readers — we understand the situation. But you don’t need me to tell you that these people are bad.”
Boyne was comfortable writing in Bruno’s voice, he says, which will lead to him writing more children’s books. He regards children’s publishing as “an incredibly passionate world”, where people are less cynical, less driven by marketing and more involved in the books themselves. That experience, and the process of writing The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, left him feeling it is by far his best work.
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“The other three, I’m proud of them and I’m pleased with them,” he says. “They’re good reads, they’re enjoyable. Like anything, they have their flaws. I just think this is the most affecting and the most honest. I think it’s going to be hard for me to follow up.”
Boyne has already finished his fourth adult novel, however. Next of Kin, set during Britain’s 1936 abdication crisis, comes out in August. A more difficult task, the author says, will be to tackle personal or contemporary themes, in order to avoid being pigeon-holed as a historical novelist.
He spent years learning to write conventional fiction, and struggled to find a publisher, so made a conscious decision to eschew personal material, to “completely remove myself from the narrative”, he says. Then he went back to work and promptly sold his first book, The Thief of Time, in 2000.
He might try to put more of himself into his fiction, but Boyne sounds doubtful that his views and life experiences could possibly be as interesting as those of the fantastic characters who populate his writing, whether they’re 256-year-old Frenchmen or nine-year-old German boys.
“Maybe my life is incredibly boring. Who cares? Who needs another novel from a twentysomething talking about jobs or relationships or whatever your vices are? Who needs them? I’m bored by them. If I write one, I’m going to bore myself, let alone readers,” he says. “It’s about having my fiction completely in a different world to where I am.”
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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is published by Random House/David Fickling