Air by John Boyne: Superb, at-times harrowing, still questioning

Irish Times

2 days ago

Air
Author
:
John Boyne
ISBN-13
:
978-0857529855
Publisher
:
Doubleday
Guideline Price
:
£12.99
In The Irish Times in 2023, Dubliner
John Boyne
, a multimillion selling author thanks to 2006's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas,
wrote about how he was sexually assaulted while in school
. Facing up to this trauma, and reporting it, inspired him to write a quartet of novellas to, in his own words, 'focus on sexual abuse from four different perspectives'.
Consequently, Water, Earth and Fire, all published over the past two years, made for uneasy reading. That's not to say they weren't well written, they certainly were, but Fire was particularly harrowing and Boyne said he found that book, narrated by a female paedophile, 'the most difficult and emotionally draining to write'.
No one who has been following along with Boyne's elemental suite will, then, be expecting Air to be a light read. As before, he takes characters from previous books and moves them centre stage.
Aaron Umber, one of the victims in Fire
,
is flying from Sydney to Ireland with his teenaged son Emmet. Aaron has split from Emmet's mother Rebecca, a daughter of the Vanessa who in Water temporarily moved to an island off the west coast to grasp at some kind of recovery after her first husband's crimes were revealed.
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Aaron and Rebecca's marriage was a sexless one as both parties were understandably 'completely broken' when they met. Aaron dislikes being touched and recalls a random sexual encounter that shows how damaged he is. He naturally fears that the sins perpetrated on the father might be repeating themselves on the son when he finds semi-naked photos on Emmet's phone. Rebecca is so scarred that her own mother warned Aaron off her the night before their wedding, and has seemingly abandoned her only child.
[
John Boyne: How I wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
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]
Boyne's main characters are masterfully realised ordinary people trying to move beyond the weight of the past ('It's not fair, is it? Life. You'd wonder whether it's all worth the bother.'). That past continually elbows its way back into the present, such as when Vanessa's second husband Ron, who seems like a perfectly decent fellow, well and truly puts his foot in it.
The question Boyne appears to be asking in this superb series is whether anyone, and he might even be including himself in that number, can ever fully escape from such horrific history.