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The House of Special Purpose - John Boyne - 29/06/09
The shocking events at a house in central Russia in 1918 have been seized on by Irish author John Boyne and turned into a moving tale of tragic ends and new beginnings ...
Author of the sensational Holocaust novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Boyne has the knack of choosing world-changing events from the past and turning them into powerful dramas about the people who witnessed them.
This time he turns his attentions to the bloody murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family by Bolshevik revolutionaries at their prison home in Yekaterinburg which the red guards cynically labelled 'the house of special purpose.'
The forbidding Ipatiev House in the Ural Mountains saw the end of 300 years of Romanov rule in Russia ... but in Boyne's story it was also the start of a lifelong love affair for royal bodyguard Georgy Jachmenev.
Georgy's tale opens as he sits at the deathbed of his wife Zoya in London in 1981 and reflects on his brief spell of service with the Imperial family in Russia and its effects on his long life in exile.
As the story moves backwards and forwards between the past and the present, we learn that that Georgy's peasant life in a backwater Russian village changed forever when he stepped in front of an assassin's bullet intended for a Grand Duke and became an overnight hero.
The grateful Grand Duke Nicholas whisked the 16-year-old Georgy from rural poverty in Muscovy to the unimaginable wealth of St Petersburg and within weeks he was taking up his new position as bodyguard to the Tsar's sickly heir Alexei.
Slowly he learned the customs of the volatile Imperial court, became an indispensable friend to the vulnerable Alexei and formed a special but dangerous bond with the Tsar's youngest daughter Anastasia.
Through the eyes of young Georgy, Boyne gives us an insider's view of the dying Russian empire, the secrets of the devoted but dangerously distant Nicholas and Alexandra, the machinations of the evil Rasputin and the events which led to the end of an autocracy.
Georgy's later life as a librarian at the British Museum is humdrum in comparison but beneath the tranquillity and order is a dark secret which, like the cataclysmic end of the Romanovs, will echo down the century.
Boyne's plotting is, as always, superb and the dialogue and characterisation are both credible and entertaining. He brings alive a world of pre-revolutionary dalliance, danger and decadence with all the gifts of a master storyteller.
Another top class novel.
(Doubleday, hardback, 14.99)
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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