Number 21 - Caging Skies - Christine Leunens

Before the cinemas shut up shop for the duration, I was lucky enough to manage to see Jojo Rabbit and I thought it was Taika Waititi's best film to date.  I also noted from the opening credits - Based on the novel Caging Skies by Christine Leunens.

Going by the old adage that the book is better than the film, I popped into Waterstones the next day and picked this up.

Based on the novel appears to be somewhat of an overstatement.  The film bears as much resemblance to the book as Cannibal the Musical bears to the real life story of Alferd Packer. I think "based on" needs to be changed to "vaguely inspired by".

The central idea is there - fanatical member of Nazi youth discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in the attic. But that's as far as teh resemblance goees.

Johannes isn't a cute young 12 year old innnocently falling in love with the girl. He doesn't have a weird invisible friend in darling Adolf himself.  He's 16 when he finds her, and his interest in her is less than innocent. And, when the war finishes, the film finishes, but the book has nearly 200 pages left.  The book is almost a different genre completely from the film.

I stilll love the film.  The changes to the story are necessary to keep an audience watching I suppose.  The Hollywood need to give your protagonist some redemption if he's done things he shouldn't seem to dictate the way the film moves. The invisible friend is a brilliant shorthand way to show how infatuated with the third Reich young Jojo is.  He's also shown to be a nice guy at heart frequently and learns how misguided he's been.

The book is so much darker.  We read everything from Johannes' first person viewpoint. We witness his indoctrination by the Nazi ideals after the Auschluss.  We don't need a goofy Hitler figure telling him what to do, he's more than happy to join in with the bookburning for himself.

Johannes is far from a compassionate, or indeed reliable, narrator and his conscious cruelty to Elsa is never redeemed.  The book reads more as a descent into madness and borderline psycological thriller than the happy fantasyesque story the film led me to expect.

However it's so well done that the confounding of the expectations is a good thing in this case rather than a disappointment. We might not like Johannes as a person, but we still feel his sorrow when family members die and feel sorry for him regardless. And it still manages to pull of a deeply black humour.

The ending leaves a few unanswered questions, as it should given the lack of reliability of the narrator.

All in all, this is a completely different experience and story to the film, and disturbing as hell in places.  I loved nearly every page of it.

A strong contender for best book of the year.  A solid 9/10