Few contemporary writers are able to evoke the ambiance and drama of our recent past as forcefully as Boyd. Here, he fully immerses the reader in the wartime era, whether it be a brief encounter with a kindly, owlish Freud in a Viennese cafe or a terrifying zeppelin bombing of a London theater…Boyd's prose is often radiant, yet it is a brilliance that serves to illuminate his story…And Boyd's characters are as beguiling as his prose. The cast of Waiting for Sunrise can be as alluringly neurotic as Freud's case studies. The characters spy, lie, betray and kill, and yet never manage to lose their charm.
Boyd excels in portraying ordinary British citizens caught up in pivotal historical events. Like Logan Montstuart, the protagonist of Any Human Heart, and Sally Gilmartin, the former espionage agent in Restless, young actor Lysander Rief has a small but crucial part to play before and during WWI. In 1913 Vienna, having gone to consult a Freudian psychoanalyst (one of Freud’s former students, in fact) for a sexual problem, he encounters Hettie Bull, a highly strung expat Englishwoman of potent carnal enchantment. Though Hettie lives with someone and Rief is engaged to be married to an English actress, they begin an affair. But she accuses him of raping her and he’s arrested, only to be rescued by British diplomatic officials, kicking off a web of intrigue that enmeshes Rief in ever more mysterious circumstances. The action moves to wartime France, Geneva, and London, where Rief is made to pay for his freedom by undertaking dangerous espionage missions. His continuing involvement with Hettie, over whom he breaks off his engagement, and his attraction to a French agent who almost kills him, sustains a strand of romantic suspense. On a deeper level, Boyd depicts the social and sexual hypocrisies of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the insidious old-boy network of the British Establishment. He hews closely to his protagonist, whose perspective becomes increasingly unreliable, echoing the book’s epigrams about truth and lies from Hemingway and Sophocles. Set pieces like Lysander’s dead-of-night mission in no-man’s-land, and his surreal experience watching a graceful zeppelin drop its bombs on central London create the atmospheric accuracy for which Boyd is justly praised. As in all of his novels, Boyd speculates about luck and chance and the unpredictable events that can determine a person’s life. With its adroit plot twists and themes of deception and betrayal, this is an absorbing spy novel that raises provocative questions. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Apr.)
It’s ages since I read a novel that offers such breathlessly readable narrative enjoyment, such page-by-page storytelling confidence and solidity. Boyd has a positive genius for pace and description.
Thoroughly entertaining. . . . Waiting for Sunrise has the pace of a spy thriller, with code-cracking and double-crossing aplenty.
Sex, psychiatry and Vienna on the eve of World War I - those are promising ingredients for a novel. And William Boyd makes the most of them. . . . Boyd’s narrative moves briskly, and his local color is deftly done.
As ever with Boyd there is an effortlessness to the prose and a piercing acuity to the period detail and evocation of place, along with thrilling set pieces. . . .[This book] proves that rarest of beasts: a tantalizingly experimental work that is also an immensely satisfying page-turner.
Always a smooth and expert storyteller, Boyd effortlessly combines historical detail with a sexy, galloping narrative that proves irresistible.
Boyd retrofits a genre full of familiar devices and character types with finer textures and deeper psychology than it typically boasts. . . . Waiting for Sunrise manages to conjure an atmosphere of genuine disorientation that most spy novels gesture toward and few, if any, attain.
Boyd is a born story teller whose clear, taut prose never gets in the way of his characters and their unpredictable fates.
A literary thriller that genuinely thrills, a plot-driven novel assembled by a master of plotting. The deftness with which Boyd knits together a complex cast of characters is immaculate. . . . It demonstrates yet again this writer’s unrivalled versatility and consistency.
Superb. . . . 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 done it again.
Fans of previous Boyd novels will find themselves on gratifyingly familiar ground in Waiting for Sunrise . . . . Few contemporary writers are able to evoke the ambiance and drama of our recent past as forcefully as Boyd. . . . Boyd’s prose is often radiant.
The Washington Post Book World
This is the sort of novel you finish, then begin again to revisit your favourite bits. . . . More than anything Waiting for Sunrise is a gleeful celebration of storytelling -- sly, clever, frequently hilarious, always involving. . . . This is the literary event of the year.
A page-turner. . . . A thinking person’s thriller.
Waiting for Sunrise retains a consistent intrigue and a splendidly intricate plot. . . . The denouement plays out with characteristic suspense and masterful design. . . . [Boyd has] a truly remarkable imagination.
An evocative mix of sex, spies, and psychoanalysis. . . . Fans of the author will love and recognize all the hallmarks of Boyd’s best books.
Waiting for Sunrise does the neat trick of evolving from a historical romance into a seat-of-the-pants spy thriller. . . . This is Boyd’s stage, on which he is a virtuoso.
The San Antonio Express-News
The narrative in this novel is almost seamless. . . . This atmospheric novel is elegantly crafted by a London writer who serves up a rich portrayal of human psychology and a plot that is both engaging and imaginative.
A tantalizing, fast-paced spy novel. . . . As seductive as it is, Waiting for Sunrise is no bodice-ripper. It’s a brainteaser, charged with uncertainty and danger, electric with restraint.
The New York Times Book Review
Powerfully entertaining. . . . Boyd’s ability to evoke a sense of time and place is unmatched. . . . He has been perfecting the craft of globetrotting entertainment for the past three decades.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch
A thoughtfully plotted story, whose twists and turns reveal the price its characters pay in trust. . . . Boyd is a nimble and entertaining writer.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Always a smooth and expert storyteller, Boyd effortlessly combines historical detail with a sexy, galloping narrative that proves irresistible."
(4 stars) - People Magazine
Always a smooth and expert storyteller, Boyd effortlessly combines historical detail with a sexy, galloping narrative that proves irresistible.
Intent on resolving an intimacy problem, British stage actor Lysander Rief travels to 1913 Vienna to undergo psychoanalysis. In Dr. Bensimon's waiting room, he meets an intense, beautiful sculptor named Hettie Bull. Though their passionate, destructive affair helps "cure" him, Hettie's betrayal sets in motion a series of events that lands Lysander in jail and eventually leads to his hasty escape back to London—with the help of two shadowy British diplomats who exact recompense. Soon, Lysander becomes enmeshed in the intrigues of wartime intelligence as World War I breaks out across Europe. With intelligence and humor, acclaimed author Boyd (A Good Man in Africa; Restless) explores the themes of truth and betrayal in the human psyche, with a cameo appearance of Sigmund Freud himself. VERDICT In this thriller for the intellectual set, the skilled Boyd has developed his characters with depth and crafted an exciting plot that moves along at quite a clip. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/11.]—Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ., Arlington, VA
A classy entertainment from the British virtuoso (Ordinary Thunderstorms , 2010, etc.)--a period caper that evolves into an adventure story of wartime counter-espionage. A handsome young English actor has a sexual problem: He cannot ejaculate. Which is why Lysander Rief is in Vienna in the summer of 1913: He's a patient of an English psychoanalyst with a crackpot theory, Parallelism. Lysander needs his problem cleared up before he marries his fiancée, the lovely leading lady Blanche Blondel. Soon enough, Lysander discovers that underneath Vienna's decorum runs a "river of sex." A fellow patient, Hettie Bull, seduces him, and to his delight Lysander performs well; hey, the theory works! Lysander enjoys trysts with the volatile Hettie, an English sculptor, until one day, to his astonishment, he is arrested on rape charges; Hettie has betrayed him to her menacing common-law husband. Military attachés at the British embassy bail him out, sheltering him and devising his escape. The actor improvises a disguise to leave Vienna which so impresses the attachés that a year later, now the Great War has begun, they recruit him to track down a high-placed traitor in the British war machine. Subterfuge has been a recurrent theme in Boyd's work. Lysander's mission entails a dangerous visit to the front, followed by a tricky confrontation with the traitor's German contact in Geneva. Even in another outrageous disguise, Lysander is almost shot dead by another British agent due to a misunderstanding. Back in London, the intrigue becomes even denser. Boyd parodies the convolutions of the genre but retains its suspense, while that river of sex flows like the Thames. A contrite Hettie re-appears. Lysander enjoys himself with her before finding true fulfillment with Blanche, who has survived a Zeppelin attack, and dispatching the traitor with the help of his gay uncle (don't tell the boss). Boyd's latest has the irresistible charm of a vintage car that's still eminently roadworthy. And it's great fun.
