The Boy in Striped Pyjamas vs I am David

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 children’s novel by John Boyne that was made into a film two years later.

I imagine that anyone who wanted to read the book or see the film has done so by now, but I had better point out that what follows contains spoilers.

The book and film tell the story of nine-year-old Bruno, whose father is made commandant of Auschwitz. He befriends Shmuel, an inmate of his own age. The two boys concoct a plan to smuggle Bruno into the camp to help look for Shmuel’s father – Shmuel brings a set of prison clothes and Bruno leaves his own outside the fence.

While Bruno is in the camp, the two boys are rounded up and gassed.

I thought the film was good, but found the book (perhaps unexpectedly for a modern children’s novel) excessively wordy and did not persevere with it.

There was some criticism of the story’s morality. Wikipedia leads us to a review of the film by Rabbi Benjamin Blech which points out there were no nine-year-old boys in Auschwitz (anyone who could not work was murdered on arrival) and expresses the fear that viewers may conclude that the camps can’t have been as bad as all that if a German boy could form a friendship with a boy of the same age.

What struck me about The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is how it contrasts with a favourite book from my own childhood – Anne Holm’s I am David, published in 1963.

The young hero, with cooperation from the authorities, escapes from a labour camp behind the Iron Curtain (in Bulgaria, if I have got my geography right) and makes his way across Europe to find his mother in Denmark.

I suspect that, along with an early reading of Oliver Twist, this book helped form the paranoid libertarian strand of my politics. To the young David, anyone in uniform is one of Them and wants to kill him.

I am David was made into a film in 2003. Despite the presence of the wonderful Joan Plowright, it was deeply disappointing to those of us who had grown up on the book.

The contrast between the two stories seems to me to tell us something about the changes in our thinking over the four decades that separate them.

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas reflects the modern belief that moral education involves the young being taught about the Holocaust and being able to recite the correct lessons from it. It also reflects the high status we give to victimhood.

In short, there can be no more moral character than one who dies in a gas chamber.

I am David was written in a different era. It is not about death, but about escape, moral growth and the finding of happiness.

Schooled in a labour camp (and Holm is also in danger of making it seem not so bad), David is a strange, even scary, creature. He is morally innocent and lethal, along the lines of the hero in an Alexander Mackendrick film.

But you are on his side and want him to find happiness. Today those hopes seem harder for us to entertain.

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Six of the Best 562

There is still crucial work to do on the campaign to reform the pub trade, says Gareth Epps.

"Dickensian would not only be inspired by Dickens’s novels: in its alternating layers of melodrama and comedy, like the ‘streaky bacon’ effect he wrote about in Oliver Twist, its style would also be truly Dickensian." Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is literary adviser to the BBC series.

"The heritage minister, Tracey Crouch, announced that Clouds Hill, the tiny home of T E Lawrence , near Wareham in Dorset has been given Grade II* status," reports David Hencke.

Alwyn Turner introduces us to William Charles Boyden-Mitchell, better known as Bill Mitchell, and better known still as Uncle Bill of British Forces Broadcasting Service.

A Lady in London discovers Eel Pie Island.

"The churches of mostly rural Suffolk ... harbour a curiosity - woodwoses (literally 'wild-men-of-the-woods'), hirsute manimals brandishing clubs." Matt Salusbury on creatures that make Jacks in the Green look tame.

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The opening night of Oliver!

Embed from Getty Images

9 July 1968 - Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
Alan Bennett Writing Home (1994)

There is at present a good documentary from 2002 on the BBC iPlayer about the opening night of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver!' It includes interviews with the late Ron Moody and Tony Robinson, who was one of Fagin's gang.

I suspect a young Robinson is second from left in the photograph above. Holding the cake is Keith Hamshere, the original Oliver, who want on to become one of the leading stills photographers in the film industry.

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Six of the Best 561

"New research from Leeds University into the impacts of permitted heather burning on upland peat bog shows that for the 20% biggest storms, the flow of water over land is higher than in areas where the moorland has not been burnt."  A prophetic post from Upper Calder Valley Plain Speaker back in August.

A little unexpectedly, David Boyle's take on A Christmas Carol appears on Philosophy Football.

Matt Crowley pays tribute to Malcolm in the Middle: "Far from the wistful nostalgia of The Wonder Years or the chummy bickering of Home Improvement, Malcolm In The Middle presents a childhood that basically sucks. Bullies rule the school, teachers are indifferent, and being smart is akin to being radioactive."

There are still 1500 gas street lamps burning in London. Maev Kennedy meets the people who light them.

Sam Roberts chooses his top 10 London ghost signs.

Judging by its place names, the landscape of Medieval Lincolnshire was haunted monstrous creatures, says Caitlin Green.

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What does J.K. Rowling know about Harry Potter anyway?

@jk_rowling no he died to clear his conscience

— Harry Potter Fans (@__HpFans__) November 27, 2015

I suspect this to be the greatest act of mansplaining of all time https://t.co/TXAqOvW6BV

— Matthew Hankins (@mc_hankins) November 27, 2015

This exchange turned up in my timeline. No doubt I was meant to laugh at Harry Potter Fans and praise Matthew Hankins for condemning mansplaining.

But I think the Harry Potter Fans tweet is fine.

Behind Hankins' contempt lie a number of connected and faulty aesthetic theories: that a work of art has one fixed meaning; that its meaning derives solely from the author's intentions; and that those intentions are somehow transferred from the author's mind to the book, which it then inhabits as a sort of ghostly substance.

The truth is different. As soon as a book is published the author loses control of it. There is no single correct reading of it that derives from her intentions. Readings multiply as its readership multiplies.

You could even argue that the better a book is, the more diverse the possible readings are, It this sort of fluidity of meaning that keeps the classics alive and makes us still want to read them.

Good criticism may reveal things the author was never conscious of. Here is G.K. Chesterton writing about Charles Dickens:

It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.

This is brilliant imaginative criticism - and it would be just as much if Chesterton were discussing a woman writer.

I will confess that I have read little by Rowling - because I found her a dull writer when I tried. But my prejudice is that everything in the Harry Potter world is that way because she says so. The stories failed to take on a life of their own that surprised their own author.

So it may be that Rowling's telling of the stories is the only possible one. But if that were true it would be a sign of her weakness as a writer not her strength.

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