Don't forget Boy in the Striped Pyjamas book

John Boyne’s 2006 novel, on which this new Disney movie is based, was one of those rare books every publisher dreams of, the unexpected runaway bestseller, as the Irish writer had up till then enjoyed only moderate success.

He wrote this story supposedly in less than three days and it’s a rapid read too, although it’s difficult to categorise the readership age it’s aimed at.

The language and vocabulary are simple enough for an eight-year-old to understand but the overall themes — how Bruno, the privileged young son of a Nazi commandant sent to run the camp at Auschwitz, perceives his situation and who the strange people in the striped pyjamas behind the fence might be — are altogether more sophisticated.

Events are only ever seen from Bruno’s perspective, so it really is a child’s-eye view from start to harrowing finish and consequently it is naïve and oversimplified. That is its charm.
By contrast, the film has joined all the dots that the book left blank for the imagination and has fleshed it all out rather clumsily. Not content to frame events only through Bruno, it has added layers of story and background just in case the audience doesn’t quite get what is happening.

It has taken liberties with the storyline, too, making both Bruno and Schmuel, the Jewish boy he befriends on the other side of the fence, eight instead of nine (why?), removing Bruno’s mother’s fondness for what he calls her medicinal sherries and taking out an important episode involving head lice.

Crucially, the ending, and therefore the story’s emotional focus, has also been changed. Whereas the book’s climax is so subtle and rapid that once the penny has dropped you’re left feeling utterly devastated, the film lurches into a lengthy crescendo of high drama that demands a hysterical response you don’t want to give. The book left me feeling that I’d been punched in the stomach but, as so often happens in film, the desire to amplify something here only succeeded in diminishing it.

If you want your children to learn more about the Holocaust, neither the film nor the book is going to help much — but then that was never John Boyne’s intention. The book’s subtitle is, after all, "A fable."

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas
Cert: 12A