To start the year off, the group read ‘All the Broken Places’ by John Boyne, a prolific Irish author whose novels are published in 60 languages, making him the most globally translated Irish writer of all time. He is probably best known for his 2006 novel ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and it’s from here that one of the characters, Gretel, is taken to relate her story in ‘All the Broken Places’.
We first meet Gretel in her early 90s, living a quiet life in her Mayfair apartment. Early in the story, hints are subtly dropped that something has happened in her past – her year long absence from her nine year old son’s life, her insistence that this apartment is where she and her husband, Edgar, must live. When a young family with their nine year old son, Henry, moves downstairs, painful memories from the past return.
Gretel’s earlier life is revisited as we hear about her escape from Germany with her mother after the Second World War, the dark post-war years in France and her brief time in Australia where she tries, unsuccessfully, to begin a new life. Even when she returns to London in 1953, she cannot escape the events which moulded her childhood and adolescence and filled her with such guilt and grief.
Guilt, the overriding theme, consumes Gretel – ’Guilt followed you down streets, interrupting the most mundane moments with remembrances of days and hours when you could have done something to prevent tragedy but chose to do nothing’. At other times she completely denies it – ‘When I looked at my past, so much of it was built around evasion and deception, the impulse to protect myself over others’.
As problems escalate with the family downstairs, Gretel has the opportunity to save the young boy. However, all this comes at a cost to her true identity. Will she take the risk?
Despite featuring the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, the book was enjoyed by group members as we empathised with Gretel’s dilemma and felt her conflicting emotions. Perhaps there were one or two unlikely coincidences, but they felt justified as they highlighted the ways in which the different characters dealt with their past actions. John Boyne’s engaging writing, well drawn characters and a clever twist or two at the end make this a page-turning read!
Louise Elsome
‘Bookworms’ Group Coordinator