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| Photo: Clara Madden |
When I met John Boyne in The Morrison Hotel in Dublin the day before his novel Noah Barleywater Runs Away was being launched in the Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar, he was notably nervous. This was his first novel for young adults since the overwhelming success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas which was translated into over 40 languages; was at the top of the Irish Book Charts for 80 weeks; made it to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list and was adapted into a high budget movie by Miramax. He apologised for the potential nerves at the start of our interview and I understood perfectly: there’s quite a lot to live up to.
When I asked the Dublin born author did he feel under pressure when writing this book because of the acclaim of its young readers' predecessor he replies: “When I’m writing I don’t feel pressure, I don’t really think about anything other than writing the book. Now, I’m feeling it a little bit because it’s one day to publication. On the plus side my agents have already sold Noah into more languages than any book I’ve done other than The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas so it’s already coming out in 25 languages so there is a positivity coming from it already; which is good. I’m apprehensive while also excited.”
Without giving anything away, the story is based around Noah Barleywater, who is running away from something he doesn’t want to think about and which the reader is discreetly given hints to throughout the book. On his journey he encounters a toymaker with some amazing stories to tell. When asked about his inspiration for the novel, Boyne chose a theme that has always been of interest to him: “One thing I’ve written about in several books is vulnerable young children left on their own: Bruno is left on his own effectively in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Turnstile in Mutiny on the Bounty doesn’t have a family and Georgy in The House of Special Purpose leaves his family behind. This really goes back to the books that made me want to be a writer, like Dickens. The books I loved as a young teenager were the orphan books like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.”
There is one notable difference with Noah in this story: “He is running away from a happy family. The reader has to discover what he is running away from but I didn’t want him to be running away from a family that was an unhappy family or was mistreating him. He didn’t want to be there when this terrible thing happened so it’s kind of trying to make a much more intimate story of it.”
Like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the reader is presented with a young boy being faced with a side of life that he is too young to be subjected to but is a fact of his life and a fact of life for certain other children. “This isn’t a situation that all kids go through but most kids know kids who have gone through it. Underneath all the jokes and all the laughs I wanted something serious. I feel that with children’s books you have an opportunity to write about something that matters and have a positive effect on a child’s life. I’m not a fan of the vampire novels or all that sort of stuff and I think that children’s literature needs to embrace its importance and not talk down to children; give them something to get their teeth into.”
For as long as he can remember John Boyne has wanted to be an author: no more, no less. “I think writing from a young age was a sign. From the age of ten or eleven I literally haven’t stopped. I had no other goal in life other than to do what I’m doing now; single-minded, focused and ambitious towards it and I never veered away from that. I did English in Trinity, I did Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and then went to work in a bookshop all the way through ‘til I got published.”
Since leaving his job in Waterstones bookshop in Dublin and now, Boyne has been nothing but prolific and is already working on his ninth novel. The ambition he has had since he was a child has never gone away but has in fact gotten even stronger over the years. “I figure I might have another 15 or 20 books left in me! Ishiguro says between the ages of 35 and 50 are the best years to write and I’m 39 now so I’m quite excited to see the decade ahead. I was first published when I was turning 30 and now I’m turning 40 and I’m releasing my eighth book so I feel like my best work is in front of me. I’m as ambitious as ever and I want to write really strong books that will be remembered.”
Although achieving discernible success from his earlier work, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was, without doubt, the book that catapulted Boyne into a completely new realm as a writer. “Suddenly, out of the blue, I had a best-selling book. It kind of lent certain legitimacy to all the years of struggling to get published, then publishing but being disappointed by the reaction to it, then suddenly something good happened! It changed my life in every conceivable way. From January 2006 to this day, I haven’t stopped. I’m traveling all the time; my books are being published in so many different countries and languages. It gave me the freedom to write, it gave me the career I wanted, and it gave me some really exciting experiences along the way.”
After the interview is over I notice that Boyne has a Waterstones bookshop bag beside him full of books. It’s clear from talking to him and the journey that he has been on in the past ten years that books are his life and his love of literature – both writing and reading – gets stronger by the day. Although Noah Barleywater Runs Away is just hitting the shelves now Boyne is a good way through his next novel and tells me he hopes to write a young adult novel again after this. It is clear John Boyne is an author with lasting power and is constantly mastering in his craft. We, as readers, have a lot to look forward to if this is the case.
Noah Barleywater Runs Away written by John Boyne and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers is available now published by David Fickling Books.
Originally published in Verbal 2010
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