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A review by skitch41
Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd
3.0
(Note: Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program)
I recently discovered this work on Amazon's website. The premise of the book sounded interesting and, even though I don't normally branch off with new authors in fiction, I decided to take a look. After finishing this work, I feel like there could have been something more. The outline of the book is that, on the eve of World War I, a British actor in Vienna seeking psychological help begins an affair with a petite, firecracker vixen and gets swept into the world of British espionage. The plot is pretty sound, if a little bit slow, but I just felt like there was more the author could've explored. The reason why is because the main character, Lysander Rief, learns of a method of overcoming psychological trauma in Vienna called "parallelism" where he essentially replaces the truth of his past with a fictitious account. Considering that the book description promised it would involve espionage and that it would be during WWI, I was hoping that the author would use parallelism to explore the line between deception and self-deception in fascinating era in 20th century history. But, he never does and parallelism becomes a sort of bookend of the events in Lysander's journey. Still, it's a decent espionage story. Just don't let the title or product description leave you expecting anything more than that.
I recently discovered this work on Amazon's website. The premise of the book sounded interesting and, even though I don't normally branch off with new authors in fiction, I decided to take a look. After finishing this work, I feel like there could have been something more. The outline of the book is that, on the eve of World War I, a British actor in Vienna seeking psychological help begins an affair with a petite, firecracker vixen and gets swept into the world of British espionage. The plot is pretty sound, if a little bit slow, but I just felt like there was more the author could've explored. The reason why is because the main character, Lysander Rief, learns of a method of overcoming psychological trauma in Vienna called "parallelism" where he essentially replaces the truth of his past with a fictitious account. Considering that the book description promised it would involve espionage and that it would be during WWI, I was hoping that the author would use parallelism to explore the line between deception and self-deception in fascinating era in 20th century history. But, he never does and parallelism becomes a sort of bookend of the events in Lysander's journey. Still, it's a decent espionage story. Just don't let the title or product description leave you expecting anything more than that.