FICTION: The House of Special Purpose By John BoyneDoubleday, 428pp. £12.99
THE AUTHOR John Boyne isn't even 40 yet and already he's had critical acclaim andcommercial success, the double-achievement most writers rave but rarely manage.
Born in Dublin in 1971, he did English at Trinity, and then he studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, whose previous graduates include Ian McEwan, Glenn Patterson, Toby Litt and Anne Enright.
After graduating, he published a number of well-received novels (including Crippen, which I enjoyed) and then came the book that made him a household name, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. This is a short, powerful account of friendship between boys who should have been enemies, Shmuel, the inmate of a Nazi concentration camp, and Bruno, the camp commandant's son. On paper it oughtn't to have been a success because the historical event that is its centre, the Holocaust, is both too big and too familiar, yet the book was huge.
There were many reasons for this. There was the language for a start. It was plain, simple and unornamented, the linguistic equivalent of a wood cut, if you like. The novel also had the virtue that it was oblique: like the iceberg’s tip above the ocean’s surface, it implied the greater bulk below, the millions who perished in the camps, without troubling you as a reader with the problem of either imaginatively absorbing the scale or plumbing the depths of the misery of all those who died.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamaswas a number one best-seller in Ireland for 80 weeks and the best-selling novel in Spain for 2007 and 2008. It enjoyed similarly stratospheric sales all round the world. Miramax also made it into a film: the writer-director was Mark Herman. There's a school of thought that no good film ever results from a good book: that may be so, but, if it is, this film, exceptionally, bucks the trend: it's good.
John Boyne's latest novel is The House of Special Purpose. It's a historical novel – the subject is the Russian Revolution – but again the approach is oblique. Georgy Daniilovich is the 16-year old son of a peasant. It's 1915, the Great War rages, and Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, Supreme Commander of the Russian Forces and cousin of His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II, is passing through Georgy's village. As he does, Kolek, Georgy's best friend, fires a gun at him: without thinking Georgy steps forward and takes the bullet in the shoulder thereby saving his Grace.
In consequence Kolek is hanged and Georgy is sent to St Petersburg to join the royal household’s bodyguard; here, eventually, he’s tasked with protecting the haemophiliac heir to the Tsar, the then 11-year-old Tsarevich Alexei.
The young Georgy, while highly intelligent, is wholly uncritical. Nothing about the Romanovs disturbs him, even their assumption that every Russian lives life as they do. For their part, the Romanovs recognise that in Georgy they’ve acquired a servant they can accept without demur, and they do. Thereafter, from his privileged position inside the family, Georgy witnesses the great calamities that assailed the Romanovs – the rise and fall of Rasputin, the October Revolution, the abdication of Nicholas, and finally, at the house of special purpose in Yekaterinburg, the murder of the Tsar and his family with – in Boyne’s fictional world – the exception of Anastasia whom Georgy spirits away.
Interwoven with the Russian material, is a second, more modest narrative – the story of Georgy and his wife, Zoya, and their émigrélife, first in Paris and later in London, where Zoya bears a daughter, suffers depression, attempts suicide and dies of cancer.
The epic and domestic strands are nicely blended and because events are told out of sequence Boyne exercises total control over pace and revelation and thereby keeps the story continuously interesting. The narrative voice of Georgy is also as marvellous as it’s cunning. Plain and simple, it creates the impression there’s no author between the reader and the events described, the result of which is that the past seems alive in a way I suspect it wouldn’t if the voice was more complicated and nuanced.
However, readers should remember that though Boyne’s ambitions are literary and he has the talent to match, his instincts are always popular. It wasn’t until the end, for instance, that I realised that Zoya wasn’t whom she seemed, an example of a type of dissembling typical of popular fiction. However, I didn’t feel cheated when the revelation came. In other words, Boyne’s a writer who uses the tropes of popular narrative without any of the usual ill effects.
At its core this novel is an exploration of the human aversion to change. The Romanovs believe they're eternal and that history, at least for them, is over. They are wrong and so is Georgy, their spokesman in The House of Special Purpose, and so, it would seem, at least in the West, are we.
We entered the 21st century feeling secure and settled, and certainly we hadn’t the slightest expectation that the succession of nasty events that have hit us was coming; we really did believe the only way was up, we really did believe, in Dr Fukuyama’s phrase, that history (meaning bad things) was over.
But it wasn’t, it isn’t, and after several decades of complacency we’re learning again that everything is horribly impermanent. Boyne’s novel, through its account of the fate of the Romanovs and their obdurate refusal to countenance change reminds us of the need to expect the worst and in that respect this is a work that chimes perfectly with our times. But then this is hardly surprising. With the stories they choose to tell, writers often put their finger on the zeitgeist with uncanny accuracy.
Carlo Gébler is a writer and teaches at Queen’s University Belfast. Adolf Gébler, Clarinettist, his collaboration with composer Roger Doyle, is on the CD Cool Steel Army from the Psycho-Navigation label