![]() The novel is dedicated to John Irving, a friend of Boyne’s, and there are similarities between the two authors, both in their chosen themes and writing style. I doubt I will read a better book all year. Indeed, I was so engrossed in the tale that I didn’t want to leave the company of all the superbly drawn characters their dialogue is to die for. It’s more than 600 pages long, but I wished it was longer. I love his sensitivity, humility, and ability to express emotion, but this book marks a shift into sheer brilliance. I read the historical fiction he wrote, before The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas made him a household name. ![]() "I thought, if I could make it funny, and still make the characters real, still make it moving and sad, well why not?” “I’d been thinking of the 90-year-old guy, and of writing a condemnation of Ireland for allowing a life like that to happen, but when I introduced Cyril’s adoptive parents, Charles and Maud, it seemed right to add humour. “It just took on a different tone,” he says. She gives the baby up for adoption, and it’s here, in the second chapter, that Boyne found his writing style start to change. The book starts in 1945 with Avery’s mother, a pregnant teenager, being denounced as a whore by a priest who, it was later discovered, had fathered two children by two different women. And he said, ‘Because it’s too late for me, but it’s not for others’.” "This guy of about 90 was coming out of the polling booth and a journalist asked why he was crying. “I remember an RTÉ report on the news on the day of the referendum. This new book, an epic history of Ireland showing the changes of the last of 70 years through the growing acceptance of one gay man, started life as an equally sad project.Īt the start he thought that his new narrator, Cyril Avery, would live as lonely a life as the priest in that book. John Boyne: I can remember one particular day coming home from school and a news report said Aids was like the plague and was going to kill everybody. He spoke of the struggle through his teens and 20s while publicising his last novel, The History of Loneliness, which looked at the issue of clerical abuse through the life of a ‘good’ priest. Growing up gay in Ireland was a terrible trial for Boyne.
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