All the Broken Places, John Boyne’s recent sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, got superb reviews, and this is predictable.

The Auschwitz Museum’s warning that his first novel should not be used for teaching the Shoah made barely a ripple: others know better.

I understand why The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the best-selling novel by an Irish writer ever, is beloved by non-Jews. It strips the Shoah down to a fairy tale, and this is palatable, enjoyable even.

Many people like to read about murder for entertainment, but seemly authors stay away from recent history. Jews might suggest avoiding the subject if you don’t want the truth, but people cannot disguise their hunger to read about the Shoah on their own terms.

All the broken places

Boyne's new book

They are greedy for our tragedy. If you haven’t read it — and you shouldn’t — it tells the story of Bruno, the son of a nameless Auschwitz commandant, who befriends Shmuel, a Jewish boy interned in the camp.

Historians might cry: how would Shmuel have the liberty to walk by the fence? How could Bruno not be schooled to hate Jews? But these are Boyne’s people, not ours, and they do what he tells them.

There is nothing Jewish about Shmuel and I wonder if Boyne has read Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel or the hidden testimony of the boys in the Warsaw Ghetto. I sense he has — he says he researched this for 18 years — and that makes his Shmuel more offensive.

He is gentle and compliant, a small Christ, a magic Jew, a helpful cipher, and who will mourn a cipher?

He has accepted his fate, and he enables Bruno to be redeemed through him. The week before he is due to leave Auschwitz, Bruno slips under the fence in the striped uniform of the Jew to help Shmuel search for his father. He is gassed. The jeopardy and the tragedy are Bruno’s. In his passivity, Shmuel is already dead.

Boyne cannot hear these criticisms. He does not appear to understand why Jews do not thank him for writing a series of books about the Holocaust that are arguably not about Jews at all, but about Nazis and their potential for redemption.

“I don’t mean this to sound arrogant or narcissistic,” he said — always a telling caveat — “but the thing that does baffle me is that organisations who are dedicated to keeping the stories of the Holocaust alive, keeping it in people’s consciousness, would be negative towards a book that has been incredibly successful at doing that.”

Now, in All the Broken Places, Boyne tells the story of Bruno’s older sister, Gretel. He conjures Gretel at the end of her life, living in Mayfair like a Judith Krantz heroine gone bad, ruminating on a lifetime of secrets.

Some passages are promising: the kangaroo court in Paris, where she is tortured alongside her mother; her encounter with his father’s assistant, an unrepentant Nazi.

Then Boyne sinks to pulpy melodrama. Gretel is pregnant by a Jewish man: what are the odds? Does the woman living across the hall — a half-Jew it transpires, another of Boyne’s useful Jewish blanks — have something to do with Gretel’s past?

The book turns from a rumination on guilt to a police procedural that reads as if it were written for cinema. I am sure there is a good novel in the stories of Nazi children, but this isn’t it.

There is, of course, a connection between this junk and the incremental tragedy of antisemitism. If Jews are fictional beings — if they are landscape — they cannot be harmed, and when a non-Jewish writer puts his non-Jewish words in their mouths, they cease to be Jewish.

So what are they, except props to a writer’s vanity and his readers’ desire to experience the Shoah through the prism of a fictional Nazi who cannot be harmed by it? This is not memorialisation, and it is certainly not teaching. It is erasure when erasure is not whimsical but dangerous. If I were as tasteless as Boyne, I would call it a kind of literary Lebensraum.

I have a suggestion for Boyne, and it is heartfelt: write about Ireland’s mother and baby homes, in which, for 60 years, single mothers were tormented and their children were stolen from them, often killed by neglect.

This subject deserves a proper novel. If Boyne can cast aside his, in my view, unseemly obsession with Nazis and his weird attitude to Jews, he could do it, and he should.