Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

Lysander Rief, a young British actor (and son of the famous actor Halifax Rief) bothered by a rather unusual and delicate complaint (that he fears will adversely affect his engagement to the actress Blanche Blondel), travels to Vienna in the spring of 1913 to consult a British psychotherapist, Dr Bensimon.

Rief finds Vienna quite to his liking, though one day as he visits the doctor’s offices he encounters two people who will have a profound effect on his subsequent life.

The first is a young woman with whom he eventually strikes up a personal relationship; the second is a man with whom he eventually strikes up a professional relationship.

This being a novel by the consummate storyteller William Boyd, it will come as no surprise that the relationships are unexpected, circuitous, interconnected, packed with incident, and dangerous. Rief abandons his proposed engagement and finds himself in trouble with the authorities and before you know it there’s a World War going on.

Boyd, with his customary skill and élan, employs a veritable multitude of interesting and finely developed characters and from the opening paragraph the action never flags. This is as enjoyable and entertaining a novel as you could hope to encounter.

The plot is complicated without ever becoming difficult to follow, and Rief is sufficiently flawed to make him both sympathetic and believable. In fact, all of the characters are both flawed and believable, and several of them sufficiently engaging that they could occupy the central role in another book.

To be honest, while Waiting for Sunrise is wrapped up most satisfactorily and conclusively, one can’t help but hope that the ever inventive William Boyd will find time to fashion a sequel of sorts from some of the characters who exited some time before we had seen quite enough of them.

This one is great fun from a writer at the top of his game.