Review of Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd (2012, Bloomsbury)

Lysander Rief, a young actor, has travelled to Vienna - the birthplace of his mother - to attend a psychiatrist in order to tackle a neurosis.  In the waiting room he meets the beautiful and precocious artist, Hettie Ball.  They start an affair which endangers them both, Rief eventually fleeing the city in early 1914.  A few months later, the Great War starts and Rief leaves the London stage to sign up for the army.  From there he is recruited into wartime intelligence due to his time in Vienna and sent to Switzerland via the trenches, tasked with discovering the identity of a spy in the war office.  Listless and unsure who to trust, Rief sets about the task, aware that his personal and work life have become horribly enmeshed.

Waiting for Sunrise is a detailed character study of Lysander Rief -- an actor from a wealthy background who holds a dark secret that casts a neurotic shadow over his life.  In seeking to rid himself of the shadow he gets drawn into an affair and pulled into the orbit of the intelligence services.  Both provide replacement shadows that haunt him and need resolution, and the story is essentially his journey to come to terms with his neuroses and find a steady and secure path.  That journey, however, is complex and dangerous, both in Vienna prior to the Great War and during the war itself.  Boyd fills Rief’s world with an interesting set of characters and social situations, and there is a strong sense of social history and place.  The prose is evocative and the plot unfolds in a steady, unhurried pace, and is nicely balanced with a subtle sense of intrigue.  And yet, for some reason, I wasn’t entirely convinced or captivated by the story; it seemed to lack something that left it a bit hollow -- a mix of direction, tension, urgency, a lead character one identified with or rooted for as opposed to simply viewing, I think.  Overall, then, an enjoyable, atmospheric read that lacked an edge.

Review of Restless by William Boyd (Bloomsbury, 2006)

The hot summer of 1976 and Ruth Gilmartin is supposedly working on a history PhD thesis at Oxford University, but is actually spending most of her time teaching English to foreign students and raising her young son, Jochen.  Her mother lives in a cottage in the Cotswolds and has started to show signs of paranoia, watching the woods behind the house with binoculars.  Having built a new life for herself after war, she senses that her past is catching up with her and turns to Ruth for help, revealing her secrets.  Sally Gilmartin is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré recruited by English spymaster Lucas Romer in Paris in 1939.  From there she is sent to Scotland for training before taking up a position in a small outfit run by Romer in Belgium that tries to plant disinformation in newspapers around the world aimed at misdirecting or undermining the German war effort.  The legacy of her time as a spy still haunts her and her training is telling her that she has one more mission to perform, one that she needs Ruth’s help to carry out.

Restless is told in chapters that alternate in time between 1976 and the war.  Whilst I found the more recent narrative to be well written and interesting, it is the war time tale that sparkles - Boyd wonderfully evokes Eva’s journey and the politics, intrigue, spy craft and danger of being a spy for a country at war.  Unfortunately the switching thus had the effect of breaking up Eva’s story with more mundane interludes that a love-sick Iran engineer/activist, suspect German guests, and Ruth’s investigation fail to enliven to the same intensity and vividness of the war years.  At one level then, this is a very good read, with engaging prose, strong characterization, and a well constructed plot; at another, it is a little uneven varying between good and outstanding, though Boyd does an excellent job of weaving the two strands together in the final part of the book with a satisfying resolution that has a nice twist.