Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers.
Believe me, in the exalted literary company Boyd keeps, that kind of generosity of spirit is as rare as hen’s teeth (try asking Sebastian or Salman for a jacket quote and see how far it gets you). So I’m not about to give Boyd a stinking review. Waiting for Sunrise could have been a sub-Da Vinci Code catastrophe, and I would still have felt obliged to describe it as ‘a compelling and heartbreaking masterpiece from one of the great storytellers of the age’.
Luckily, I’m off the hook. The new novel is superb; hand-on-heart, may-the-Lord-strike-me-down terrific. It opens in Vienna in 1913, where a callow Englishman of 25, named Lysander Rief, has gone in search of a psychiatric cure for anorgasmia. No, I didn’t know what it was, either. Let’s put it this way: when it comes to sexual intercourse, young Lysander can proceed to the finishing post but has a problem, er, crossing the line.
As luck would have it, Rief encounters a brazen seductress in his psychiatrist’s waiting room who has soon cured our hero of his unusual sexual hang-up. They embark upon a steamy affair, but before long he has been arrested for a crime he did not commit. With the connivance of the British embassy, Rief goes on the run, returning to England with plans to revive his career as an actor.
All of this may make Waiting for Sunrise sound light and playful. The first half is certainly possessed of that breezy tone — somewhere between the comic and the deadly serious — at which Boyd excels. There’s also plenty of characteristically vivid writing about the joys and absurdities of sex.
What gradually emerges, however, is a bildungsroman in which Rief — ‘a young, almost conventionally handsome man’ who knows ‘a lot about a few things and very little about a great deal of things’ — develops into an altogether different beast.
We have been here before, of course. What is Any Human Heart if not a tale of innocence to experience in which Logan Mountstuart finds himself flung against the rocks and random accidents of a life well-lived? ‘All history is the history of unintended consequences — there’s nothing you can do about it,’ Rief observes in this novel. Yet Waiting for Sunrise is in many ways a more serious book than Any Human Heart, in that it attempts to demonstrate just how powerless we are in the face of events.
That Rief should arrive in Vienna at the dawn of Freudian psychoanalysis is no accident. This is the tale of a man whose id and ego are at war. Here is Rief’s way of putting it:
We try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive, the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations.
In Rief’s case, the catalyst for personal change is the first world war. He finds himself repaying a debt to the Foreign Office by agreeing to travel back to Vienna as a spy. This is the third time in successive books that Boyd has leaned on the conventions of genre in order to achieve his effects. Again, this is no accident. Writing in the Guardian last year, he observed that ‘the world of the spy novel may be the best analogue of the human condition, writ large’.
Clearly he was thinking as much about his own fiction as that of acknowledged masters such as John le Carré and Graham Greene.
Having set Rief up as a slightly bumbling charmer, Boyd demonstrates that he possesses that sliver of ice in the heart required of all successful spooks. Waiting for Sunrise morphs into a molehunt story, a sort of Tinker, Tailor re-imagined by Eric Ambler, in which our hero is confronted both by the truth of his personal ambition and by the limits of his own morality.
It should probably be said that readers who know Boyd’s work only through his Costa-winning blockbuster, Restless, and the recent Channel 4 adaptation of Any Human Heart, may lament the absence of a more conventional narrative. There are no depth-charges of suspense laid in Chapter Three primed to explode 100 pages later. Boyd has never been interested in conventional plotting, nor in conventional assessments of character. He knows that, as human beings, we are all flawed, all greedy, and all very slightly absurd.
To read a William Boyd novel is to open a bottle of wine, light a fire, sit back in your favourite armchair and trust that the master practitioner will take you on an intriguing and unpredictable journey. He’s been doing it brilliantly for years, and with Waiting for Sunrise he has done it again. Perhaps they could use that as a blurb on the cover.
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