Imagine, if you will, the most average book ever written. A book attempting nothing that hasn't already been done to death, a book that challenges nobody, a book with no surprises save just how bad it is. That book is The House of Special Purpose.
I'll be separating my review into three sections:
Things I Didn't Like About the Book as a Book, Historical Inaccuracies, and Characterisation. Please do note the absence of a Things I Liked category. It wouldn't have been worth typing out the heading.
1. Things I Didn't Like About the Book as a Book
This book is, simply put, boring. Considering the source material, that fact might be an achievement in and of itself.
The main problem is that a lot of things happen but the writing is such that you don't realise anything has happened until it's already over. For example, the inciting incident is our protagonist Georgy preventing the assassination of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. I don't remember much about this sequence beyond slight confusion as I struggled to parse what exactly Georgy was doing and how he possibly had the time and room to do it in. You may think that this was a deliberate effort to portray the panic and disorientation that such a situation would cause. I can assure you it was not.
A consequence of this is that while hypothetically interesting events are left, right, and centre of the narrative, they remain only hypothetically so. This might not be such a problem in the hands of a more skilled writer, but Boyne is evidently not that writer. Plot-driven stories are perfectly valid and that seems to be what Boyne was going for here, but the trouble is that you need to be able to write a plot.
He also doesn't seem to know how to write characters...at all. You don't get attached to any of them because they are either so bland or so inconsistent that they don't feel anything like real people. What can I tell you about Georgy? Well, he's nice. Except for one scene wherein he is the most arbitrarily cruel character you have ever read about. He has old-fashioned values, which we are explicitly told is a trait of his before ever getting to see it in action.
Another problem it had—though this is tangentially related to the main one—is that there are too many improbable situations waved away for the sake of the story. In historical fiction, such scenes are to be expected and even encouraged. But, as Boyne has discovered, there is such a thing as too much fiction. Why on earth would both Alexandra and Anastasia be walking (separately) unguarded and alone through Mogilev at night? How could Maria possibly orchestrate a full-on affair with a random guard who her parents barely know and do not trust? Most egregiously, in what universe would it be possible for Anastasia to sneak out of the Winter Palace and wander around St. Petersburg?
My next problems are, I suspect, the result of personal preference so read ahead with that caveat firmly in your mind.
Boyne does the thing I despise where the author sprinkles in words from another language in order to make the book feel more authentic. The only thing this achieves is to draw the reader out of the book and make them wonder whether, as the rest of the book is not explicitly in Russian, we are to imagine that all of this is being conducted in English.
Next, and this problem is three-pronged, names. Boyne is somewhat inconsistent in how he chooses to spell names. He anglicises Nikolai to Nicholas, Nikolaevna to Nicolaevna, and Maria to Marie. This is all well and good, but it does beg the question of why he chooses to leave other names such as Daniil or even Georgy in their transliterated forms when perfect English equivalents exist.
I also suspect that Boyne doesn't quite grasp Russian names. The protagonist's sisters are only ever referred to by the diminutives of their given names: Asya, Liska, and Talya. At first, I thought this was to show how close he was to them, but after reading the rest of this book I have the sneaking suspicion that Boyne thinks these are the given names.
One character has the patronymic "Vladyavich" which would imply that his father's given name was Vladya; a diminutive of Vladislav. Very bizarre, but not necessarily out of the realms of possibility. I think, however, that Boyne means to imply that this character's father was Vladislav and not Vladya because of the even more bizarre names possessed by two other characters: Kolek Boryavich and Sergei Stasyovich (who is incidentally Maria's guard love). Not only is Kolek a very strange name in and of itself, but his patronymic is not real. We are told explicitly that Kolek's father is called Borys and so his patronymic should be Borisovich (or Borysovich as Boyne insists on spelling it). Stasyovich, if we follow the line of logic set out by these, is in Boyne-world supposed to come from Stanislav but in reality would imply Stas', a diminutive of Stanislav. I'm beginning to think that Boyne is allergic to research.
Another peculiar example is the nickname "Pasha" belonging to our protagonist, whose given name you might remember is Georgy. Pasha is a common diminutive of Pavel and so an odd thing to call a Georgy. The justification is that Pasha means "small." You may note that Pasha means small because Pavel means small and not because it's simply a word independent of anything. This leads me onto the third prong.
Georgy, a peasant boy from nowhere-ville with zero education, seems to know the meaning of every name off the top of his head. Zoya means life, Pasha means small, Arina means peace, Georgy means farmer—all this and more he dutifully rattles off over 493 pages. Does any of it have any bearing on the plot? Not really, no. Boyne would just like us to know that he did some googling before sitting down to write. In fact, the very last words of the book are explaining the meaning of Zoya which in some ways felt quite fitting—it at least let me get one last eye roll in.
2. Historical Inaccuracies
Oh, where to start?
The first problem makes itself apparent quite literally on page 1 when Georgy informs us that he was born in Kashin, a town in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. What is the Grand Duchy of Muscovy? Well, you'd be forgiven for asking given that it hasn't existed since 1547. And this is not Georgy showing off his splendid education yet again, as he later tells someone that he's from the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and that person responds as though this is a perfectly normal thing to say and not the equivalent of me describing myself as hailing from Mercia. What Boyne meant is the Moscow Governate, but I suspect he was too tired to find out after looking up all those names.
We continue with the theme of location for my next point (which is really two points, but it's probably best to put them together). This book begins in 1915, some time into the War and a year that the Imperial family spent almost entirely at the Alexander Palace. Reading this book, however, you wouldn't know it. Much of it takes place in the Winter Palace—a residence that Nicholas II and his family barely used at the best of times, nevermind during the War. Throughout 1915 and 1916, they are described to be taking their usual holidays to Livadia and aboard the Standart "as if the world was as it had ever been." The Standart was, in fact, placed in dry dock when the War broke out and wasn't removed until long after the 1917 revolution. Similarly, the last time Nicholas II and his family stayed at Livadia Palace was before the War in 1914. I can understand that Boyne wanted to give a little variety to his settings, but to do so and then put it forward as evidence for the Romanovs' nonchalance towards their country's suffering is perhaps a little deceitful.
My next few points are comparatively minor, but worth mentioning all the same. Firstly, the Grand Duchesses are described as having all their lessons as a group of four. In reality, they had most lessons individually with occasional lessons being taken in their pairs (Olga & Tatiana and Maria & Anastasia). The only teacher ever mentioned in the book is Monsieur Gilliard (known as Zhilik within the family) who taught all the children French and oversaw Tsarevich Alexei's entire education. It's strongly implied that he was the children's only teacher which would be rather a lot for even a man of Gilliard's capabilities.
Now we come to Eira. Eira was a yappy terrier who belonged to the Empress and who, as Boyne correctly characterises her, was little liked by others. Unfortunately, I must now revoke this singular historical accuracy point because she died in 1906 and was therefore not present at the Ipatiev House, as Boyne claims.
On the subject of the Ipatiev House, Boyne has much insight to offer. Apparently, it had an "utter lack of security" with both the front door and the gate being kept open at all times. Georgy, and probably the reader, wonders why the family "didn't simply come downstairs and flee." The windows were seemingly not whitewashed in July as Georgy sees the Empress through one of them, and then Maria is allowed to simply waltz out onto the street in search of Eira who has run out of the aforementioned open front door. Georgy even asks Maria how she was allowed out and she informs him that "They give us as much freedom as we want." Need I even comment?
Later that same day, Alexei comes wandering out to meet Georgy at the front gate and proclaims that he "has been quite well." In reality, Alexei suffered a haemophilic attack several months earlier at Tobolsk and was unable to walk for the rest of his life.
There is a claim made by Anastasia that "My parents went to a different party every night of the week" before the War broke out. This is obviously an exaggeration in order to get across the point she's making, but even a scaled-back version of this claim would not be true. Alexandra hated parties because they gave her headaches and she avoided them as much as possible—part of the reason the aristocracy hated her so much was because throwing parties was considered one of the Empress' duties and Alexandra didn't fulfil it.
3. Characterisation
Let's do this one from best to worst. That way, I can pretend that this review has any sense of structure and coherence.
I've already spoken a little about Georgy, but let's dig deeper. As I mentioned before, he's a generally mild character with seemingly no real opinions about or attachments to anything beyond his love for Anastasia and by extension her family. The biggest problem I had with him (and, for that matter, the plot) is that I cannot imagine Anastasia falling for such a nothing person. This man has the personality of microwave porridge. And yet, somehow, he is also simultaneously The Worst.
At one point, his sister Asya turns up in St. Petersburg. She explains that she's hoping he'll be able to get her a job at the palace, and that she's been living in a fairly bad situation in the city but will return home should he be unable to find her anything. Asya's entire characterisation up until this point has been how much she wants to live in St. Petersburg and, if she can't be a part of it, to at least be adjacent to high society. He has been hearing all his life about how much she wants this. So Georgy agrees to ask around, and they part ways. He speaks to the head of staff at the Winter Palace and she does have an opening for a maid, so he puts his sister forward. But when he meets up with Asya, he decides to tell her that there was nothing available which forces her to go back to Kashin. Why does he do this? Georgy doesn't really have an explanation. The real reason is, of course, so that Boyne can wave away the question of why none of Georgy's siblings are ever seen again after the first third of the book. But it means that Boyne has now written a character who does awful things like that for no real reason and never follows up on this trait. You might say that real people do mean things for no reason all the time in real life, and you'd be right. But this is fiction—and fiction has to make sense.
With one (almost) irrelevant exception, the rest of the main cast is comprised of the Romanov family who are accurate to life with wildly varying degrees of success.
I think the most well done was Alexei. In fact, beyond a few grievances with how and when he gets injured, I'd say that Alexei is pretty much perfect. I don't really know how Boyne managed to achieve this; the entire time I was reading I kept waiting for him to write something horribly un-Alexei-like but I don't think he ever did. There, he can have back that point I took away for crimes against Eira.
I'm going to award second best to Olga, but don't be fooled! This does not mean that Olga was done well—I would go so far as to say that she wasn't done at all. She gets two lines, and neither betray much about what she's like. The first is something about Georgy looking tired, while the second is complaining about having to become a nurse. Olga appears a few times in the background of other scenes but doesn't really do anything and so unfortunately that's all I can comment on.
Third place goes to the Emperor himself, Nicholas II. I believe that Boyne has generally portrayed him well, though there are a few...hitches, I suppose you could say. First, book Nicholas seems quite happy to divulge his innermost thoughts to some eighteen-year-old in his guard. Georgy doesn't really do anything to make himself a particular friend to Nicholas and never says much of consequence during these little monologues—that would require Georgy to have opinions, and we don't want that. Nicholas is also very exasperated by his wife, Alexandra, and Boyne claims that "their relationship had begun to disintegrate." Anyone who has read their wartime letters can tell you this is exactly the opposite of the truth; I had to stop at one point because they're almost painfully sentimental. Most, if not all, interactions they have throughout the book involve some sort of argument and it's made obvious that Nicholas is quite tired of her.
Alexandra herself suffers from the usual charges set against her by historians who like to build easy, one-dimensional caricatures out of those they study. Boyne's Alexandra is hysterical, frigid, and unkind. When she isn't shouting at staff she's ignoring them, when she isn't lecturing her children she's tricking them into caring for her. Her family all dislike her and seem to try to avoid her as much as possible. If you know me, you know how strongly I feel about this abhorrent treatment that Alexandra has been given over the years. It's reductive, misogynistic, and frankly betrays a lack of research. If she was truly this awful, selfish, cold-hearted person then why would she have so many friends? Why would her husband speak of her with nothing but adoration? Why would her children spend so much of their time in her company? Reading her scenes in this book I was certainly disappointed, but I can't say that I was surprised.
Now, Boyne's portrayals of Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia are very much a race to the bottom.
Anastasia is our love interest for this book and consequently a nothing character. Not quite so bad as Georgy, but certainly far from good. I can see almost nothing of the real vivacious, high-spirited Anastasia in this book Anastasia. Oh and, surprise, she somehow manages to survive her family's murder by simply walking out of those aforementioned open front gates. Truly, an original and well-written twist.
Maria starts out by being quite mean and stuck up, but halfway through does some sort of spontaneous 180 when I assume Boyne deigned to read her Wikipedia article. The only thing she does of consequence is have that affair with the splendidly named Sergei Stasyovich, because in Boyne-world being a romantic translates to going against your entire belief system to have a little fun. Poor Maria.
Without a doubt, the worst of all was Tatiana. I think it's actually impossible that Boyne did even the tiniest amount of research into her, and if he did then he actively decided to go against everything he read.
Our introduction to book Tatiana is her teasing Anastasia for defending Georgy against one of Maria's mean comments about him. What does Boyne write? "'Our sister is in love,' cried Tatiana." It was at this point I knew all was lost. In real life, Tatiana was as shy as her mother and wouldn't have dared to say something like that in front of a stranger the very first time they met—in the middle of a lesson, no less! She then goes on to discuss Georgy as though he isn't there, going so far as to call him a "simpleton."
Halfway through the book, during a supposed mid-war stay at Livadia Palace, Alexandra suggests that she along with Olga and Tatiana train to be nurses. Real Tatiana was dutiful and eager to help in any way she could during the War, and regardless adored her mother so that she would've done anything she asked without complaint. So what does Boyne write? "I turned to look at the Empress's two eldest daughters, who had both grown a little pale at the mention of their names [...] 'Father?' began Tatiana, but he was already nodding his head..."
Boyne then appears to mix up Olga and Tatiana, describing Tatiana thus: "She looked pale and had lost weight since her nursing duties had begun." Olga, in fact, suffered from what might be called depression while she worked as a nurse and later suffered a nervous breakdown. Tatiana thrived. She did not, for example, say things like "There are mornings when I wake up and wish that I might fall ill myself in order not to have to be there." She also talks about how little the doctors seem to care about rank—something that I find indescribably funny given that one of the most well-known anecdotes about her (one that was included in her 2013 Wikipedia article, I checked) concerns how she complained about not being allowed to boil silk and breathe carbolic acid on account of her age and rank.
I shall leave you with a quote that Boyne attributes to Tatiana while discussing her nursing, but which I think would be far more suited to describing how he writes historical fiction:
"Oh but I'm terrible at it!"
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