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Yann MartelTim Fraser/The Globe and Mail

Canadian author Yann Martel could use a friend as he tours Britain and Ireland this month in support of his controversial Holocaust novel, Beatrice and Virgil. The Canadian author crossed the Atlantic "inside an electron cloud of negative reviews," The Times reported this week, only to encounter a fresh buzz of indignation on arrival, with many British critics agreeing that his semi-absurdist assault on the "limits of representation" - the moral taboos that guard the enormity of the Holocaust from potentially trivializing interpretations - had failed badly.

"The best that can be said about it is that it is not as bad as some say it is," concluded The Times reviewer, Aravind Adiga, another winner of the Booker prize for his debut novel The White Tiger.

But Martel will discover at least one good friend Sunday when he takes the stage at the Dublin Writers Festival to discuss his book. Indeed, one could say that there is no figure in the literary firmament with more sympathy for Martel than the author who will be interviewing him there: Dublin's own John Boyne, who horrified critics - and thrilled readers - with The Boy in Striped Pajamas, a sentimental "fable" of personal redemption set in Auschwitz.

"I've been there," Boyne said during a recent interview in Toronto. "I can see the journey he's heading into."

Although Boyne's Holocaust fable is far more conventional and purportedly realistic than Martel's deliberately disjointed allegory, both artists were labelled renegades for the mere attempt.





Boyne drew fire from all quarters, clerical and critical, for imagining a friendship between a nine-year-old prisoner and the son of the camp commandant, both of them strangely oblivious to the true nature of the charnel house they inhabited. "This book is not just a lie and not just a fairy tale, but a profanation," New York rabbi Benjamin Blech quoted an Auschwitz survivor as saying. "No one may dare alter the truths of the Holocaust, no matter how noble his motives."

Yet Striped Pajamas has sold five million copies worldwide since it was published in 2006, was recently made into a film and has appeared on countless school reading lists. Boyne says that he has visited "upwards of 400 schools" to discuss his book with schoolchildren, characterizing it as a gentle introduction to "the really powerful, important works of non-fiction" he hopes they graduate to.

"Is it probable?" he asks. "No. Is it possible? Yes. To me, it's a work of fiction. It's a fable, and it either works on those terms or it doesn't."

Martel drew fire for his strenuous attempts to avoid realism, substituting animals and taxidermists for Jews and Nazis, with a result that is "misconceived and offensive," according to a scathing review in the New York Times. (The paper published a second, less negative review of the book a week later.)

Hurt and annoyed by U.S. reviews, the author heralded his trip abroad with a long article for The Times Online that defended his allusive approach. Without meaning to offend history, he wrote, "I suggest that we make the gate of Holocaust allegory a little wider, a little higher, so that artists might freely bring in their wares of metaphors and symbols."

Nothing annoys the Canadian author and his Irish defender more than the free use of the unlovely verb, trivialize. Partly, the accusation is levied by critics who expect novels that do take on the Holocaust to meet a high standard. But it's also a word the two feel is too easily trotted out.

"It's what lazy writers do, to say a book is trivializing the Holocaust without actually explaining why," Boyne argues. "I certainly wasn't trivializing the Holocaust and I would challenge somebody to say where in the book the Holocaust is trivialized. And I would say the same thing for Yann Martel."

As Martel does himself: People who throw out the t-word in response to every new interpretation reduce artists to the status of Holocaust deniers, according to Martel. "The fear of trivialization is the result of limiting our representations of the event," he wrote. "By freeing up our representations of the Holocaust we will secure, overall, a greater, more nuanced, and more useful understanding of it."

Boyne is more emphatic. "The people who are trivializing the Holocaust are the people writing those trivial reviews," he said.

No one has levelled the same complaint against The House of Special Purpose, Boyne's latest novel, a love story set in the Russian Revolution. An intimate portrait of the doomed royal family seen through the eyes of a loyal peasant boy ensconced by chance in the Winter Palace, its only conceivable offence is its sympathy for a beleaguered Czar Nicholas.

But the aim is the same, according to Boyne: to bring a vanished way of life to vivid life for new generations of readers who might otherwise never dip into Russian history.

"People who are interested in knowing about the last days of the Czars may not want to sit down with a large non-fiction academic book, but they might be interested in a great story that will tell them about it," he said. "And I try to keep it reasonably factually correct - as much as a work of fiction can allow."

Fortunately for authors of historical fiction, the public demurs.

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