Sunday, June 3, 2012

Review- Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel


Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel
William Boyd (2012)
PR6052.O9192 W35 2012
Vienna, 1913, under lemony summer skies at the corner of the Augustinerstraße where it intersects with the Augustinerbastei is where Waiting for Sunrise opens. The author, William Boyd, just a page earlier has provided the reader with a slightly unsettling epigraph, a quote from Hemingway, “A thing is true at first light and a lie by noon.” Tucked in the back of the reader’s mind, the impact of the epigraph only comes to have full meaning in Sunrise’s denouement. In between Boyd spins a beautifully observed masterful tale of pre-war Europe, especially Vienna and London, and the height of the First World War, moving from Vienna to Geneva to the trenches to England and London.
Lysander Reif, a young English actor, is in Vienna seeking psychotherapy for a troubling sexual problem and gets caught up in an affair with an enigmatic English woman. With the help of mysterious British diplomats, Reif has to make a desperate escape from Vienna and they, in turn, ensnare Reif into the world of spies, intrigue and murder – where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day - as countries pitch headlong into the cataclysm of the world at war. 
One of the most compelling aspects of Waiting for Sunrise are the echoes and pacing of writers like Paul Hofmann, Robert Musil, John Buchan and Graham Greene. But Boyd’s work is his own as we follow Reif’s story and wait for sunrise to hopefully make clear the truths found in shadows. As we discover, not all things are as they appear to be.