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A review by rosseroo
Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd
5.0
Just reread this and loved it all over again. Boyd's novels tend to follow the same framework, following a single man for a number of years, weaving him into interesting places and pieces of the 20th century. Here, the protagonist is Lysander Rief, a minor London stage actor who has gone on sabbatical to Vienna in 1913. He's there to seek a cure for a very private ailment of a sexual nature, and has heard that the nascent psychoanalytical movement might be just the ticket. The first third of the book follow his efforts in that area, romance, and complications arising therefrom.
The middle section finds him back in London, with WWI just heating up. Before long he is whisked from his position as a translator in an civilian internee camp and asked to perform a delicate task for the government, one that takes him from the front-line trenches to Geneva. The final third of the book has him back in England to hunt down a spy.
As usual with Boyd, the period detail is immaculate and the characters have depth an substance. The story is clever and a bit of a page-turner in disguise, as it trades in the classic trope of the everyman protagonist thrust into extraordinary circumstances, fulfilling the reader's fantasy of how they might also rise to the occasion in similar circumstances. There's one aspect of the plot that's possibly too contrived for some readers, but even that is so elegantly dealt with that it's hard to quibble with the results. Highly recommended for readers who enjoy historical fiction laced with espionage.
The middle section finds him back in London, with WWI just heating up. Before long he is whisked from his position as a translator in an civilian internee camp and asked to perform a delicate task for the government, one that takes him from the front-line trenches to Geneva. The final third of the book has him back in England to hunt down a spy.
As usual with Boyd, the period detail is immaculate and the characters have depth an substance. The story is clever and a bit of a page-turner in disguise, as it trades in the classic trope of the everyman protagonist thrust into extraordinary circumstances, fulfilling the reader's fantasy of how they might also rise to the occasion in similar circumstances. There's one aspect of the plot that's possibly too contrived for some readers, but even that is so elegantly dealt with that it's hard to quibble with the results. Highly recommended for readers who enjoy historical fiction laced with espionage.