John Boyne: 'I wanted this book to work its way through to a positive conclusion'

Multi award-winning John Boyne is famed for the global phenomenon The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas, which sold more than 11 million copies.

His latest, Air, is a contemplative tale about Aaron, who is trying to become a better father to his son Emmet on a long flight from Sydney to London.

Each of the four novellas, Water, Earth, Fire and Air explore the topic of abuse from a different perspective, he told RNZ’s Saturday Morning.

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“The first one is an enabler, somebody who is questioning herself whether she has enabled somebody to commit these terrible crimes.

“The second one is somebody who is complicit, the third one is somebody who is the perpetrator, and I finish in Air with the victim-survivor.”

The four books are standalone novellas where a minor character from each becomes the narrator of the next one, he says.

“The first three books, of course, are really quite dark, but what I wanted was Aaron's story, the survivor story, in a strange way to be the lightest of the four, because I wanted to say to people that you can have this terrible thing happen to you when you were a kid, and you do not have to let it define your life, that any minute that you still allow your abuser to have any power or control over you, steals another minute from your life.

“So. I wanted this book to work its way through to a positive conclusion. I wanted to go out of these four books on a high, in a way where there is joy at the end, by him connecting with his son and confronting his past and saying you know what, I'm only 40, and I've had enough pain, and I'm not going to put up with it anymore. I'm going to get rid of this. I'm going to take it off my shoulders and throw it away,” Boyne says.

In recent years, Boyne has also opened up about the abuse he faced at school as a child in Ireland, and the four novellas have been the most challenging project of his 25-year writing career, he says.

“I think the hardest point for me was the eight, nine months I spent on Fire the third novel, where the voice of the perpetrator was in my head all the time, and I was still conscious that I had one more book to write, I would say of every book I've ever written in my life, that was the one where it really, really weighed down on me…where every time I went out for a walk in the park or was out with my friends or my family, any time away from it was good for me, good for my own mental health, really.

“But I also knew that I felt like I was on something important. That if I could get to the end of four and tell these stories in an original, interesting way, that would make readers think about this subject in a different way, then hopefully, if I did it right, I would have achieved something powerful.”

Now that he has completed the quartet of novels, he’s says he’s done with the subject.

“There's a sense of relief in getting to the end of them…and the phrase I've been using is I've written myself out of this subject.

“This has been inside me for a long time, and I feel like I've said everything in these books that I want to say on the subject of abuse. I don't see it being something that I'll come back to.”