John Boyne's debut children's novel, the 2006 Holocaust tale The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. Rarely has a children's book evoked such diametrically opposed reactions, having been embraced by some Jewish groups and dismissed or strongly criticised by others.
It is perhaps an understatement, therefore, to say that this is a hard act to follow. Although Boyne has published two adult novels since Pyjamas – one concerning the mutiny on the Bounty and the other the murder of the Romanovs – Noah Barleywater Runs Away is his first return visit to children's fiction. And what a sparkling return it is.
Highly amusing, refreshingly original and extremely moving, Barleywater fizzes with energy and ideas. It plays with language and perceptions and makes you smile as you eagerly turn the page to find out the next twist in the protagonists' outrageously fantastical adventures.
The closest thing I can compare it to is David Almond's The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon, upon which I've previously heaped praise in this paper. Both are written with such an assurance and lightness of touch. Both are charming but without whimsy. Both offer rich layers of liberating absurdity, expertly grounded in their own internal logic. The end results are, however, two very different journeys. Noah Barleywater has to face real fears and loss.
Boyne's Striped Pyjamas was presented as a fable; Barleywater is subtitled "a fairytale". The way Noah Barleywater encounters the various characters peopling the pages, their reactions and interactions, fit perfectly within the fairytale tradition. Here, an apple tree can talk, and a man reads an early evening edition of the newspaper in the morning, which is what makes it the early edition. It is a place where a door is left open because "the simplest way to prevent a break-in is to leave the door unlocked".
It is when Noah meets the old toymaker – his father a toymaker before him – and the old man takes up the narrative that Barleywater hits new levels of delicious absurdity, but with real tenderness at its core. As a young man, this old man could run – boy, could he run. He ran four miles to school in two minutes. He became the only Olympian ever to win the 4x400-metre relay single-handedly, handing himself the baton "in a complicated manoeuvre that quickly passed into legend". According to him, that is. Are we really to believe a man who tells Noah that the then queen had him run to Balmoral and back with a prince on his back?
At the centre of this book lies a mystery, and because I was privy to the secret before reading Barleywater, I can't say, hand on heart, whether or at what stage the penny might have dropped. But even if a reader does work out what lies behind both Noah Barleywater and the old man's running away, it's unlikely to spoil the enjoyment of this inventive tale.
Sparsely illustrated by fellow Irishman Oliver Jeffers, Boyne's Barleywater is an eminently satisfying concoction, brimming with wonderful ideas and silliness, but infused with such truths as to leave one with very real tears in the eyes.
Link: The Guardian
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