Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd – review

Vienna, 1913. Psychoanalysis? Check. Looming war? Check. Pastiche imagist poetry? Check. The early stirrings of logical positivism among the first Vienna Circle? Perhaps subliminally, but it would be hard to work that explicitly into a polished middlebrow literary yarn. Otherwise, William Boyd has been nothing if not assiduous in ticking the boxes implied by his historical setting.

Boyd's previous book, Ordinary Thunderstorms, opened by casting the reader as bystander, pointing out an anonymous young man in the street who turns out to be the hero. Boyd begins Waiting for Sunrise with the same trick, inviting you to notice a well-dressed young Englishman, Lysander Rief. He is an actor on the London stage, with "fine straight hair", come to Vienna to seek a talking cure for his inability to orgasm. A kindly Dr Bensimon teaches him to rewrite his own past, and soon Lysander is orgasming all over the place. (One in the eye for Dr Freud, who is seen pooh-poohing Bensimon's theories in a café.)

Lysander has not chosen his new orgasm-facilitator wisely, however: she soon has him arrested on trumped-up charges, and he has to escape Vienna. ("Fucking consequences again," he thinks much later, though I was left unsure whether the possible pun is deliberate or era-appropriate.) Luckily, escaping Vienna proves not too difficult, as Lysander turns out to be a master of disguise. His exploit intrigues a couple of mysterious Englishmen, so Lysander is invited to do a spot of spying when the war starts. First a quick (not to say touristic) trip to the front line in France, then a dab of interrogation, then a holing-up in dingy London offices, on the paper trail of a mole in the military bureaucracy who is passing secrets to the enemy.

Cross Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story with Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong and John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and you might be considered impressively ambitious. What Boyd has made is not so much a hybrid as a series: first, sex in Vienna; next, war in the trenches; finally, counter-espionage in London. Despite efforts to tie them together by means of recurring characters, the parts do not feel interdependent, and none is developed enough to be compelling on its own.

The language doesn't help. What ought to be spectacular set pieces (Lysander crossing no man's land; a Zeppelin attack on London) are hurried along in a flat, outline-ish prose: "[He] looked up just in time to see a window embrasure topple outwards and drag down the half wall beneath it." Perhaps this is aiming for pace and muscle, but the writing is never as rhythmically energising as it is in a good thriller, and there is little in the way of sensuous detail. It reads instead like functional description in a film script, except without the typographical excitement of capitalised PEOPLE and THINGS. Many sentences could have done with extra care: early on, Lysander is seen "staring at a flowerbed in a fearful quandary", which is an unwise place to put a flowerbed.

This is not to say that the novel lacks pleasing craft. While investigating his mole, Lysander pictures memorably the logistical operations of a continental war as black smoke converging on a bonfire, rather than drifting from it. On the same page: "Two women typists faced each other typing, as if duelling, somehow." (Though arguably that "somehow" is effect-diluting.) There is a fine, moody interlude in Geneva, where – in the novel's best scene – Lysander learns he is, after all, the sort of man who can torture another. Meanwhile, Lysander's gay uncle Hamo, a former major and "not particularly famous explorer", is a splendidly gruff and sympathetic creation, of whom one always wants more when he is hustled offstage, too often in favour of Lysander's vampish mother.

In the closing pages, Lysander reflects on his experience: "I was provided with the chance to see the mighty industrial technologies of the 20th-century war machine both at its massive, bureaucratic source and at its narrow, vulnerable human target." It sounds like a sexily sellable one-line proposal for a sweeping first world war fiction; but this curiously unexciting novel hasn't delivered on the pitch.