All the Broken Places by John Boyne
Published by Pamela Dorman Books
Publication date: November 29, 2022
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Historical, Literary
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What better way to start the last month of 2022 then with a 5 ⭐️ book. It’s John Boyne’s mesmerizing novel, All the Broken Places. Where some novels entertain by skating along the surface, this book plumbs the deepest depths of the human psyche, hunting the meaning of complicity during one of history’s darkest chapters.
Gretel is a widow in her 90s living in a luxury apartment in London. Her life is simple and she keeps it that way with only visits from her oft married (and divorced) son, Caden, and her friendship with the younger widow across the hall. Until the apartment below her is sold to a couple with the potential noise-making of a 9-year-old son. Thankfully, Henry turns out to be a quiet boy who loves to read in the building’s courtyard. His parents, an actress and a director, are a different story and Gretel finds herself drawn into a disturbing amount of family drama.
Much of All the Broken Places is complex and uncomfortable, but Boyne parses the timelines neatly to ease transitions. Chapters are split between present day London and the various locales of the past, including Paris where Gretel and her mother escaped in 1946. This bifurcation is handled with subtlety, allowing the Gretel that was to unspool against the Gretel that is.
That she is unlikable is no surprise. It’s acknowledged in the book’s synopsis that her father was the commandant of Auschwitz. She was 12 when they lived outside the camp, but had some understanding of it. What is just as unsettling is the sense of menace she inspires from the very beginning. This could make for a one-note character, but Boyne is not a writer to take the easy way out. Yes, Gretel has spent a lifetime in a set piece of wealth and solitude designed to hide the ugly truth of her own actions. But despite the defenses, denials, and rationalizations that follow her through the years it becomes clear that she is haunted by her past. The ease she exudes is a façade.
The Holocaust is enough of a subject to carry a novel by itself, but in Boyne’s hands All the Broken Places unfolds into layers of the human experience that go far beyond the war. His gift for the nuances of human frailty, seamlessly harnessed with a compelling plot and unforeseen twists makes All the Broken Places an extraordinary story that engulfs the reader.
If you’d like more all-encompassing reading from John Boyne I highly recommend The Heart’s Invisible Furies.
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Well, you’ve made me curious. As a woman of a certain age whose life has currently been upended in the best way by an 18-month-old, I can relate to Greek. . If this isn’t 540 pages I may check it out, thanks!
What?! It sounds like I need an email update!
It’s not quite that long.
I did not realize Boyne had a new novel coming out until last week! I love his writing so am excited to check this out. Excited seems like the wrong word to use, though, given the subject matter. It will pair well with the non-fiction books I’m slowly reading called “100 Saturdays.” The author spends nearly every Saturday with a survivor of the holocaust – she lived on the island of Rhodes which is off the coast of Italy. All the Jewish residents were rounded up in the summer of 1944. So she spent time in Auschwitz. The chapters are really short, but the brevity almost makes the content more impactful in a way.
I look forward to checking this out!
There was very little book press about this novel. It may be due to his other novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. There was recent controversy with it, but I didn’t have a problem with him or that book. You don’t need to have read it to read this.