Author interview: Boyne offers an eerie insight into the dynamics of abuse

At the age of 53, John Boyne is in a good place. Some 24 years since his first novel The Thief of Time was published, his body of work could barely be more impressive. 

Along with his 17 best-selling novels for adults, he’s written six for children, two novellas, and a collection of short stories. Such a list is all he’s ever wanted.

“There are still times when I can barely believe it,” he says, citing a recent book event in Azerbaijan.

He has financial freedom. His parents, although elderly, are well and still independent; he’s just returned from Paris, where he stayed at the Oscar Wilde Hotel with the man he’s ‘head over heels’ in love with.

And he’s finally come to terms with the abuse he suffered as a schoolboy at Terenure College. 

“I’ve accepted it,” he tells me over zoom. “It’s part of what happened to me in my life, and I don’t feel any anger.”

That wasn’t always so. Back in 2015, when I interviewed him on stage at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, along with his friend, writer Paul Murray, a question from a staunch Catholic in the audience, who criticised him for writing about clerical abuse in A History of Loneliness, evoked a deeply emotional response from Boyne.

“It just poured out of me that night in an unexpected way,” he says. 

It was the first personal book I had written, and I wasn’t accustomed to talking about it.

Since then, he’s been to court to help friends who were abused by his former English teacher, John McClean, and has reported his own abuser to the gardaí. 

And, Fire, the third of four linked novellas exploring abuse, has recently been published.

Boyne says he hadn’t planned to write a series.

“I wanted to write something really short in this one narrative voice, but when I was halfway through Water, I was out for a walk in Marlay Park and the whole sequence of Water, Earth, Fire, and Air came into my head.

“By the time I’d finished my walk, I had the whole concept. The first would be narrated by someone who’s enabling abuse, the second by someone who’s complicit, the third by someone who does it, and the fourth someone who has it done to him. 

“And I’d use a character from one book to narrate the next.” 

Writing in an experimental way

His editor embraced the idea, but writing in this experimental way wasn’t without its difficulties.

“It was interesting,” says Boyne. “I knew that Water would be published while I was still writing Fire, and before I started writing Air, so there was no going back. 

“No rewriting what I had written in Water and Earth. I’d have to stick with whatever I had written this far.”

Water featured a woman, wife of a swimming coach imprisoned for abuse, who escapes to an island off Ireland’s West Coast and assumes a new identity. 

We also meet Evan — a talented footballer who, struggling with his sexuality, wants only to become an artist. 

He becomes the narrator in Earth, after he’s escaped to England, ended up in football, and been accused of complicity in a rape charge.

Freya, who narrates Fire, lives in Evan’s former apartment, and was a jury member at his trial. A burns doctor — admired for her consummate skill and care for her patients, she lacks empathy in everyday life, and seems unable to sustain any kind of relationship.

“When I was planning the sequence, I knew that when I got to the book about a perpetrator that it had to be a woman,” says Boyne.

“There seem to be so many articles about women who have a position of power over their students; teachers, in particular, and who have sex with boys. 

“And if you read the comments section, there are always guys saying, ‘I wish that had happened to me when I was 15’.”

I read that and I think, you wouldn’t say that if it was a man with a girl.

“It might feel OK for some in the moment, but any boy who is essentially raped by an older woman can still have a traumatic effect in the future. 

“It can still mess up your ideas about women and sex and relationships.”

He cites one acquaintance, who boasted about his teenage relationship with a teacher, but tells of an author friend, Joe Gibson, who wrote a memoir detailing his 20-year relationship with the teacher which started when he was 17.

“He ended up marrying her, but she took control of his life. He’s over 40 now and says his life has been really damaged by her manipulation. 

“His hope for attending Oxford University was gone; he had no teenage parties and never hooked up with girls his own age. 

“At the time he thought he was in love, but at distance he realised what was stolen from him.”

Two teenage boys, in particular, feature as victims in Fire. Rufus suffers immediate trauma, whereas George thinks of Freya as his girlfriend.

“He’s going to turn into a nightmare,” says Boyne, saying that Freya has damaged him really badly as well.

The book, he says, is the most difficult one he has ever written; and not just because he was writing it around the time that he was due to go to court to give evidence against his abuser, when the man died, denying him and others, closure.

“Writing in the voice of a paedophile and keeping that voice in my head, walking around with it for nine months was quite dark,” he says. 

“It became overwhelming at one point in a way that the first two books didn’t. And it was hard trying to find a way to make Freya, if not sympathetic, then to make her behaviour understandable.”

In flashbacks, he shows us the abuse Freya suffered at 12, at the hands of teenage twins.

“That’s not to justify it, but most of the people who do these things, men or women, there is some reason other than malevolence.

“I often wonder what happened to my teachers back in the day. What trauma did they go through? Not everyone who is abused become an abuser, but most abusers were abused.”

Last time I interviewed Boyne, back in 2020 during a reprieve from the worst of lockdown, he had all kinds of extravagant plans — from living in Australia, to becoming a deck hand. What happened?

He laughs. “I come up with all these ideas, and I do travel a lot, but then I start writing. It always comes back to this.”

Boyne always knew he wanted to be a writer.

“My earliest memories were of writing stories. It was the one thing that made me feel myself — what I was born to do. And from when I was a teenager I was very focused. 

“I knew what I wanted, and I believed in myself. I just wanted to publish books. That was it.”

Although he’s best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, his favourite is The Heart’s Invisible Furies.

“It’s the book most people talk to me about,” he says. “When its mentioned at an event everyone claps.”

He’s now started writing something different.

“I need that to free my mind from this dark story I’ve been working on for the past four years,” he says. “Every book is a kind of reaction against the previous one.”

Unlike many writers, who stress how difficult writing is, Boyne still finds it joyful.

“Even though Fire was hard to write I was never not excited by the process of sitting down to write. 

“It’s still something that engages me and relaxes me. I feel good writing. I’m not tortured. I’m blessed.”