John Boyne (2020) A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom.

This is the third John Boyne novel I’ve read and reviewed. For a short time The Heart’s Invisible Furies had a lot of hits on my blog site (Wordpress, and by a lot I mean over two in a week). I wasn’t sure why that was. I rarely remember what I wrote. Writing is a way of keeping track of time.

His novel, classified for younger readers, and told from a child’s perspective The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which was made into a film, was, em, boring and unrealistic. I don’t mind saying that about multimillion sellers, but am loath to admit the same thing for those in my league that are less likely to sell 100 copies. I tend not to review those.

I wasn’t sure about A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom (many gates, which is a start. Wisdom singular and plural). When writing a review, it’s best to start with the punchline. So this paragraph should be the first.

I made a lot of notes. Nobody cares. Did you like it or not? That’s the crux. And the answer is aye. I dipped in and out of the 430 pages. It begins Palestine AD 1. Marinus has a job to do for King Herod. He’s got to slaughter a dozen infant boys. He uses a special knife for his work, a parazonium. Get in and get out. He’s not very popular with his neighbours.

The denouement of each story carries over into the next story, like those sums we used to do at school, carrying a one down the bottom line we’re counting, which means a ten.

Each story has a boy (never a girl) that is cursed and blessed with a gift. He’s a creative. He’s different from the rest. Art for art sake. Perhaps designing clothes or shoes, carving images on gravestones or inside graves, are all possibilities for him. His father will curse him for being goofy and poofy for caring about women’s work. Not a proper son that fights with other boys and is a chip off the old block. A blind soothsayer appears from century to century, often to guide the narrator and to remind him to let the stars be his guide. Typically, the creative’s nemesis is another boy, often a cousin, sometimes homosexual and often beautiful, but with twisted and useless legs and reliant on crutches. The protagonist demands justice from his antagonist for betraying him and hunts that what haunts him from story to story.

In the final section, The Sun, The Moon and the Stars, we have the Great War to End all Wars, then the beeping of the first Sputnik in space, Russia AD 1961, in which a father meets a (creative) son, a mathematician, he doesn’t understand…

United States of America AD 2016

‘I didn’t know whether she was deliberately trying to annoy me or not, but Zoe was wearing a T-shirt with the image of her favourite troglodyte grinning while making the thumbs-up gesture, along with her “Make America Great Again” hat. I wanted to whip it off her head and set fire to it.’

Yep. That resonates with me. Raymond, the narrator, can’t seem to understand why anyone can vote for a draft-dodging, rapist, sex pest, tax-dodging thief, who like Le Penn was sponsored by the Russian state and his buddy Putin, but hadn’t quite got around to mounting an insurrection in the seat of government and instructing his racist mates to hang the Vice President because he refused to go along with his attempt to seize government by arms. How quickly we forget.

In the Epilogue, the narcissistic, geriatric psychopath Trump is no longer President, which is good, but the Earth is no longer habitable. I guess there are always trade-offs. Read on.       

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