Fire By John Boyne Book Review

Fire By John Boyne Book Review

Review By Harsimran KaurRating: 4/5

The wind creases the fire, leaves it disgruntled. The bending arc of the fire through an extraordinary rebellion twists back to normality.

The water douses the fire; it is now left with no appearance; only a bedeviled smoke irritating the nostrils.

The Earth stirs the fire in aplomb! It rises high and the same soft-dry mud retires the flames to raddled bitterness.

Fire is thus a foe, an ugly eldritch that nobody wants to come near to. The decrepit ‘Fire’ unleashes toxic behaviors; of raving & ranting a contemptuous hook of uncertainty in its capacity to consume the flesh, butchering the pores, sabotaging the idee-fixee of ‘solipsistic identity’. The elements of ‘wind’, ‘water’ and ‘Earth’ preside as a coup de grace settling the ‘fire’ in the phantasm of oblivity.

Often, through the element of fire, rises a human mind, a pungent character borne out of revenge. It is vindictive to ply its wounds by leaving roughage incandescently splurging in a dystopic network of self-loathe. Freya is born out of fire, not in the profound sense of it but through the firestorm blazed in the childhood dilettantes, characterizing her to be the enfant terrible in the ‘present’.

Freya is persuasive, performing a deus ex machina to allure ‘young boys’ to trust her, and finally she is able to bring them into the woods to showcase her divilrious charm. Interpreting a character like Freya, one thinks why she is the hard-bitten damsel who impeccably performs skin grafts and tends to patients with burns during the ‘day’, and ‘night’ becomes a cadenza flowing through an arabesque of titillations and impropriety? Has life seduced her in the most deplorable ways that perspiring in the distraught fire of revenge, she now seeks impunity? 

Who is the real Freya? Is she the ‘burn-healing’ specialist, Dr. Freya Petrus or the ‘Freya’ that still carries the wounds of a 12 year old self that was buried alive by two young boys?

‘Fire’ by John Boyne is about a beleaguered childhood falsely stuck in the capriciousness of human fancies. What we believe as our expression of loyalty might turn out to be an indiscernible astigmatism? What we don’t believe further as life progresses carrying the past perfidies is the propensity to trust the ‘motive’ lurking in deleterious minds in simulacrum to the mind that could bury someone alive.     

Freya is bruised by the ‘fire’ that put an end to her inconspicuous fragility, and if not guilt consumed her less, the art of healing the burn wounds occupies as a effluvium reminding her that elements of ‘fear’ and ‘insecurity’ dress opulently in our minds caparisoned by past perfidies. The character ‘Freya’ puts its readers on a burner to assimilate;

  • If it is our natural instinct to believe ‘what we are’ or the refinement of the mutilated spirit puts us on the saddle?
  • Do we continue to live in the torn moments of our vulnerability or aggrandize the self to make life an intimidating reflux of revenge?
  • Does past pontification make use diseased or psychological distress is another human treachery?

Freya, now a burn specialist, is on her way to create ripples in the life of young boys. What do we call this charade? Is it revenge or certitude to see the same darkness that once drowned her in an empty crust of mud to be buried alive?

TAKE AWAY

Powerful and disturbing!

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