Books wrap: John Boyne revisits the Holocaust in his new novel; Fiona Sussman in conversation; and more

John Boyne.

David Herkt describes confronting the Holocaust while reading John Boyne's new novel All The Broken Places, his sequel to the best-selling The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

My first exposure to the horror of the Nazi Holocaust occurred when I was 7. There is probably never a right time in a child's life to confront the details of this event, where more than six million men, women and children were murdered through the actions of the German state apparatus. Many groups of people were fatally singled out: Jews, the Romany, homosexuals, the intellectually disabled, and members of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

As a young child, I had never been an easy sleeper. I would sneak out to the dining room and conceal myself beneath a chair that offered an unimpeded view of the lounge television until my parents went to bed. I'd watch adult dramas, comedies, and documentaries.

One terrible night I saw a late-night historical programme about World War II. There were group executions by machine-gun fire, children being arrested in Poland with their hands raised, the grim barbed-wire fences of concentration camps with piles of dead bodies being bulldozed into trenches, and gaunt-faced and starving survivors in striped uniforms.

I have spent a lifetime attempting to come to terms with what I saw that evening. There were years' worth of bad dreams. Later I read widely historically to try and make some sense of it. If anything, the Holocaust disturbs me more now than it did when I was 7.
Later, I saw an older woman on a Melbourne tram around 1985. It was summer and she wore a short-sleeved dress, revealing a long, faded, grey-blue number tattooed up her forearm, which included the barred German seven.

"You must have been really young when they did that to you?" said another woman, leaning across the aisle.
She nodded. "I was 15," she replied.

More recently, searching for a gift for a 5-year-old girl. I picked up a book from a series of books of exemplary lives — people like David Bowie, Madame Curie, and Coco Chanel — which aimed to educate and entertain with large pictures and few words.
It also told the story of Anne Frank, the young teenage Jewish girl who kept a diary in hiding but who, once discovered, would go to her death in Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. I think what I found so uncomfortable about the book was that all the horror was deliberately erased. The nightmare was buried under the surface of a final illustration of a train as Anne Frank travelled on her last journey into the unknown ...

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was John Boyne's controversial novel written for young readers, 12 years old and upwards. Subtitled "A Fable", it sold more than seven million copies. It focused on a German family living in Berlin, principally on 9-year-old Bruno and his sister, Gretel, who Bruno has nicknamed "The Hopeless Case". After a visit from the Fuhrer (who Bruno calls "Fury"), his father is promoted to the commandant of Auschwitz, taking his family with him.

Bruno misses Berlin and city life but as he takes lonely walks around the long perimeter of the camp he starts talking to a young boy on the other side of the wire, Schmuel, who Bruno thinks of as wearing "striped pyjamas". They share a birthday. A friendship grows. There are many mysteries that Bruno does not seem to understand.

Schmuel's father seems to have strangely gone missing inside the camp, so the boys concoct a scheme. Schmuel smuggles a camp uniform to Bruno so that he can join him in the search. There is no good end to the story as the novel finds them holding hands in the dark of the gas chamber.

If, as Theodore Adorno wrote in 1949, "after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric", what then is it to write a children's book about the subject?

Boyne's "fable" was controversial, not the least because many readers thought it was a true story and the book contained many historical inaccuracies. It was also the way Boyne dealt with the Holocaust, somehow blunting its cruelest edges beneath a child's perceptions.

The just-released All The Broken Places is Boyne's sequel. It is a novel aimed at adults. Bruno's sister, Gretel, is now 91, widowed and living comfortably in London. New owners – a couple and their child — have moved into the flat below. Gretel had escaped with her mother from Nazi Germany to France where they attempted to bury their past as the daughter and wife of a notorious of concentration camp commandant. She does not refer to Auschwitz other than to call it "that other place", even to herself.

The novel describes Gretel's sometimes dramatic post-war life in France, Australia, and London in episodes interwoven around her gradual discovery that the husband of the couple in the flat below is brutally beating both his wife and their 7-year-old son. As Boyne states in his afterword, he always intended "Gretel's Story" to be the conclusion of his narrative. Gretel might run but, ultimately, she cannot hide from herself.

All The Broken Places resolves many mysteries for readers of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, although it can be read as a stand-alone work. It observes youthful events through adult eyes and details the effects that any attempt to bury the past can have on both individuals and their culture. The novel clearly demonstrates the mechanism of intergenerational trauma and how it operates.

Boyne's sequel does not have the words "a fable" on the title-page — and it most decidedly isn't. It explicitly explores many of the puzzles that The Boy in Striped Pyjamas had evaded. In many ways it is a better and more mature work, though definitely not as visceral.

For me, it did not ask me to relive the still unspeakable horror of the Holocaust — if that is even possible. It provided some measure of distance from which I could evaluate and judge.

Whether we can write poetry after Auschwitz or even fiction dealing with the subject are still questions that every reader must ask, but All The Broken Places considers those echoes that must resound in each of our lives.

All The Broken Pieces.

All The Broken Places, by John Boyne (Doubleday, $37), is out now.

strong>Greg Fleming talks to Fiona Sussman about her new novel

In her fourth novel — and her second foray into crime fiction after the gritty, Ngaio Marsh Award-winning The Last Time We Spoke — Fiona Sussman takes us into the privileged world of a respected North Shore-based family doctor.

The medical world is one Sussman knows well. She completed her medical training here after immigrating from South Africa in 1989 and worked as a family doctor before retiring to concentrate on her writing.

Fiona Sussman.

But what sets The Doctor's Wife apart is Sussman's skill in setting fully rounded characters in challenging real-world situations. The result is another superb thriller with a very human heart.

This is a swing back to crime fiction after your last novel — what drew you back to the genre?

I'm fascinated by the human psyche and the influences (both personal and societal) that impact a person's behaviour. Each of my novels, to a greater or lesser extent, explores these themes, the story, more than any genre, always leading the way.

When, in 2017, my second novel, The Last Time We Spoke, won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, I was gobsmacked. I'd not thought of it as falling under the banner of crime fiction. An invitation to attend Bloody Scotland — a crime-writing festival in Stirling — led me to appreciate the wonderful breadth of the genre, from your cosy murder mysteries and police procedurals, to the more literary fiction. The common denominator they all share is engaging storytelling.

I came home buoyed by the warmth with which the crime-writing community had embraced me, and as I sat down to begin work on my fourth novel, I realised I'd been wooed to the darker side.

Your previous life as a doctor must have been rich with content?

Absolutely. For me, practising medicine was often about journeying alongside someone at a time when they were at their most raw and vulnerable. It was always a humbling experience and an absolute privilege to be invited into someone's life at such a challenging time. I came to both medicine and writing with a love of the human story, and my years a doctor certainly taught me a lot about human nature.

One character deals with a sudden health problem, another is autistic; what drew you to these characters?I'm drawn to the stories of those who are marginalised and forced to navigate the periphery of society because of their culture, race, neurodiversity, sexuality, health. Such people are often perceived through the superficial lens of stereotypes, and the challenge I set myself as a writer is to bear witness to their fuller story. Both the characters you mention view and engage with the world quite differently from others, and in a story that revolves around "the truth", their atypical perspectives add an element of tension to the narrative.

There's also a simmering "class" tension in the book between the doctor and his less wealthy — albeit middle-class — friends ... it's something you've also examined in The Last Time We Spoke with quite different disparities.

Yes, the discrepancy in wealth in The Doctor's Wife is less dramatic, and so the tensions elicited are perhaps more nuanced, never-the-less they still exist and go some way to influencing various characters' behaviours. It speaks to the very central role money has in Western Society — the power and status it wields, the opportunities it affords or denies, the emotions it elicits, the characters it shapes.

In crime fiction what's more important to you the journey or the destination — i.e. whodunnit?

For me, the whydunnit is what really fascinates me — the forces exerted on an individual and the flaws in their nature that steer them into forbidden territory. However, I also really enjoy the challenge of "solving" a crime, picking up on the clues and cues an author drip-feeds the reader. In a cleverly crafted novel one can almost feel one step ahead of the detective/author.

What do you think fuels our appetite for local crime fiction?

Crime fiction, per se, allows us to venture into worlds most of us would hopefully otherwise never visit. And then, after a roller coaster ride, order is restored. That's a very attractive experience, especially when so many of the horrors happening in our everyday world are not neatly resolved. There's something immensely satisfying about good winning out.

In terms of local crime novels, familiar settings can definitely enhance the tension in a story, giving the reader a more authentic sense of "there but for the grace of God go I".

Our growing interest in local crime fiction is also thanks to the amazing work of individuals such as UK-based Craig Sisterson, who have championed the genre and shown the world what awesome Antipodean crime writers we have. In fact he, alongside Clan Destine Press, has just published the first-of-its-kind anthology, Dark Deeds Down Under, showcasing 20 Australian and Kiwi crime writers.

Which writers currently inspire you?

I read very eclectically across all genres, but two authors I greatly admire are Elizabeth Strout and Helen Garner, both for the simplicity of their writing and their uncanny ability to drill down to the core of human nature.

In terms of local crime writers that inspire me, we currently have so many good crime writers in New Zealand. I've just begun reading Michael Bennett's Better the Blood and am in awe.

The Doctor's Wife.

The Doctor's Wife, by Fiona Sussman (Bateman Books, $38), is out now.

Read about the history of the contraceptive pill in NZ.

Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised
by Alice Te Punga Somerville
(Auckland University Press, $25)
Reviewed by Kelly Ana Morey

It's not often that a poetry collection comes across my desk for review, so the arrival of Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki), was an unexpected treat. Although poetry may not be my wheelhouse, the location from which Te Punga Somerville writes, Māori scholar/writer, is not all that far from my own, so much of what she writes about felt familiar and uncomfortable at the same time.

The collection's title relates to a piece of advice a friend of Te Punga Somerville's was given about writing, that foreign words should always be written in italics. Te Punga Somerville's response to this is to italicise the vast majority of her collection, which is written in English, rather than the te reo Māori words, giving the latter primacy as the native or first language. Always Italicise is divided into four sections, Reo, Invisible Ink, Mahi and Aroha, which broadly cover the topics of loss of language, racism, work and finally a handful of love poems, each with a dedication to their inspiration.

Many of the poems, because of their academic nature and prose-like style, feel like distillations of essays. As if Te Punga Somerville has plucked the key themes/ideas from her many years of writing, teaching and thinking about all things indigenous, and arranged them on the page. This scholarly approach to poetry is underlined by the poem "An indigenous scholar's request to other scholars", which takes the form of a dense two-page academic footnote. However, there are just as many poems that are more lyrical in form and even a couple, like the fabulous "Mad Ave", which read almost like short stories with their narratives, characters and locations.

Always Italicise How to write while colonised.

The strength of Always Italicise as a whole lies in its authenticity. Te Punga Somerville stays in her own lane, so her poetry is about things that she either knows intimately, has observed/researched or things that have impacted on her personally as a Māori woman who happens to be a Fulbright Scholar with a PhD from Cornell University who has held academic positions at universities in Hawaii, Aotearoa, Australia and Canada. And while this might not seem the most obvious of positions on which to base a collection of poems that examine issues like racism, the loss and reclamation of te reo Māori, and indigenous identities and issues, from it's no less valid a Māori voice. Earning a good salary or being respected in your field doesn't protect you from a neighbour who assumes because you're Māori and your husband's Fijian, that you are tenants rather than homeowners. Nor does it keep you safe from the mean-kids politics that are rife in institutions like universities. Situations which can see a departmental colleague rendered invisible for, ironically in this instance, being visibly different. These are quiet and thoughtful poems, offering another Māori perspective on what it is to be Māori and indigenous both at home in Aotearoa and out in the world.