Book Review: The Absolutist

Book cover of The Absolutist. Photo / Supplied

The Absolutist by John Boyne
Doubleday $39.99

John Boyne, author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, has published a new novel with links to World War I. The Absolutist traces the experiences of a young serviceman through a deft weave of past and present.

Tristan Sadler returns from the war, damaged, yet able to pursue a career in publishing and then writing. He wants to deliver the letters of his dead friend (Will Bancroft) to the sister who wrote them. This event prompts a slow but enthralling illumination of his past and equally riveting take on issues that emerge from war.

Boyne sets his narrative tone with a collision of post-war attitudes in the opening pages. Something so unspeakable had occurred in the room reserved for Tristan, the boarding house is reluctant for him to stay in it. However, when Tristan discovers it was a liaison between two men, he has no qualms about staying.

Boyne's first chapters raise questions gradually addressed in the unfolding story. Why has Tristan sealed any prospect of love? Why did the thought of his second love make him vomit up the tray of food? Why was he banished from home with the hope the Germans would shoot him on sight? Why did he flee so dramatically from the church? Why was he in a holding cell?

This is a book that would lose its carefully measured impact if I gave you a detailed plot summary. So these questions will stand in its stead.

On the one hand The Absolutist is the moving and finely crafted story of a young man learning to negotiate his feelings of desire, the brick wall his family has erected to block him out, and his own attitude to the ethics of war and conscientious objectors. Each produces a significant personal impact, but experienced together, add to his state of confusion immeasurably and then the novel's momentum. Within the delicate pace of the book, there are pockets of unbearable intensity in the waves of misunderstanding between Tristan and Will.

On the other hand, the narrative exposes the cruel effects of war. I liked the way the politics of war is played out at the level of the personal - the way those gruesome war statistics are superseded by stories of terrible loss, hardship and suffering. It brings to life the way one dead man and one living man can have such a ripple effect on those who watched their friends and family go to war.

Hidden in the seams are different kinds of courage. Alongside the bravery of the men going to the French trenches, is the different and more controversial bravery of those who questioned the right of men to kill the sons and fathers on the other side.

I am not sure if the epilogue, set 60-odd years later, is entirely necessary as it breaks the seductive rhythm of the main narrative, but I happily devoured the catch-up,

Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.