Book review - Waiting for Sunrise

William Boyd’s 2012 novel Waiting for Sunrise was published a year before his James Bond outing, Solo. Both involve spies – as did Restless (2006); having said that, this is not a spy novel nor is it a thriller.

The book begins and ends with second person narrative, a literary device, as if the reader is personally viewing the scene through the director’s eyes. The bulk of the novel is third person point of view. However, there are also sections in the first person, ‘Autobiographical Investigations’ by the main protagonist.

Lysander Rief, an actor son of a deceased famous thespian, is undergoing therapy in Vienna in 1913; part of the treatment is for Rief to write down in a journal his ‘autobiographical investigations’. His problem is of the psychosexual kind. He meets the intriguing and beautiful Hettie Bull who miraculously solves his problem and then involves him in a scandal. He escapes the opprobrium with the aid of a couple of Foreign Office types – who then later call on him to return the favour. We’re halfway through the book before Rief is recruited as a spy. The method of his infiltration is contrived, to say the least, yet it does give us a powerful insight into aspects of trench warfare.: ‘star shells and distant artillery, the throat-clearing expectoration of machine-gun fire…’ (p227)

Later, when Rief returns to London, he is in the midst of a bombing raid by zeppelins, and these scenes are intense and dramatic. His time in London is devoted to rooting out a suspected mole. Again, the ending was contrived and a bit of a damp squib, which is a pity, because the writing and observational detail persisted in creating the impulse to keep turning the pages.

On the whole, Boyd is very good at description, painting a scene, and his character studies create realistic players. He is a pleasure to read. Rief's ex-girlfriend is appearing in a play, The Reluctant Hero. Now employed as a spy, he ‘felt envious, experiencing a sudden urge to rejoin my old life, to be back on stage, acting, pretending. Then it struck me that this was precisely what I was about to do. Even the title of her play was suddenly apt. It rather sobered me.’ (p214)

Good writers utilise the skills of their main characters; Rief’s acting isn’t simply a career label to stick onto him. ‘He was feeling surprisingly tense but was acting very calm, and he thanked his profession once again for the trained ability to feign this sort of ease and confidence even when he was suffering from its opposite.’ (p348) Excellent stuff.

Possibly the first appearance of the book title in the text is when Rief is stuck in no man’s land: 

‘… the best course of action was to stay put and wait until sunrise. Then he might know what to do next.’ (p231)  Followed by: ‘… he tossed and fidgeted, punched and turned his pillows, opened and closed the windows of his room, waiting for sunrise.’ (p322)  And, the penultimate: ‘… he smoked a cigarette, waiting for sunrise. Sunrise and clarity, he thought – at last, at last.’ (p407) Finally, to hammer it home, ‘… and I hoped that sunrise that day would bring understanding and clarity with it – or at least clearer vision. And I thought I had it…’ (p419)

But of course we know that some sunrises occur in fog and then there’s no defined clarity; particularly where spies and double-agents are concerned…

A gripping, atmospheric novel, though flawed.

Editorial comment

A very minor quibble. Rief’s ‘autobiographical investigations’ relate some conversations in this manner:

ME: I still have the ring…

BLANCHE: What are you trying to say…?

And yet another shows:

MUNRO: Not clever enough…

LYSANDER: I admit…

Here, it should have been consistent with other examples, and show ME not LYSANDER.

My review of Restless can be found here and of Solo here

My comments on point of view can be found in Write a Western in 30Days (pp56-67), such as: ‘Second person narrative has its advocates, but it generally smacks of a literary device and doesn’t make easy reading, particularly when at novel length or in genre fiction. Here, the writer is speaking directly to the reader, even addressing him as “you”, as if he existed in the narrator’s world.’ (p58)

Spies and more spies

Last night BBC4 TV aired the final part of Andrew Marr’s series on genre paperback fiction – Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers. (See my earlier blog here).

This time it was the turn of the spies.

We visited Berlin, the remnants of the Wall, the prison where betrayed agents were incarcerated and tortured physically and mentally, and glimpsed old images of traitors such as Blake and Philby. All grist to the mill for John Le Carré’s breakthrough novel The Spy Who came in from the Cold. An old interview revealed that he wasn’t surprised that no communists liked his spy tales!

Another interview was with Frederick Forsyth; we’re shown film clips from The Day of the Jackal, whose protagonist was not a spy but an assassin; the point was that both Le Carré and Forsyth, along with several other scribes of this genre had some background in intelligence work. One of the first of these was Somerset Maugham (notably Ashenden), who confessed that looking back on his fiction he found it difficult to separate fact from fiction in his work.

 Maugham's Ashenden

Perhaps too much attention was given to the (admittedly interesting) William Le Queux’ popular sensationalist novel The Invasion of 1910 (1906) regarding a fictional account of a German armed invasion of Britain. The furore following its publication prompted the setting up of a British secret intelligence department, The Secret Service Bureau headed by Mansfield Smith-Cumming in 1909.

Other interviewees were Stella Rimington, a former director general of MI5 and author of the MI5 officer Liz Carlyle books, author Charles Cumming who has written eight spy novels since 2001, an early snippet from Len Deighton, and William Boyd who wrote a new Bond novel, Solo (reviewed here.

Other authors who are examined include (inevitably) Ian Fleming, Gerald Seymour, John Buchan, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler, with intriguing interpretations and motivations.

Quite rightly, Marr states that he is annoyed at the literary snobbery with regard to spy fiction and genre fiction in general. It’s as if being “popular” is anathema.

At their best, spy novels delve into the dark recesses of the human condition, examining the repercussions of betrayal, corruption and deceit. 

Despite the high-tech surveillance in the present, there is still a place for the human spy.

As in the earlier two episodes, there were bound to be some deserving authors omitted, among them Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor), author of the Quiller books, Erskine Childers (The Riddle of the Sands), Dennis Wheatley (Gregory Sallust novels), Helen MacInnes, Alan Furst, David Downing, Desmond Cory (Johnny Fedora series), Colin Forbes (Tweed series), John Gardner (Railton family series, Bond), and Craig Thomas (Aubrey & Hyde series), among others!

The programme is re-broadcast on BBC4 TV tomorrow, Wednesday evening. The series is also linked to the Open University - see here

where you can 'dig deeper into crime, fantasy and spy fiction'...

FFB - Restless

Restless is the William Boyd book (2006) that was made into a TV movie in 2012, starring Hayley Atwell, Rufus Sewell, Michelle Dockery, Michael Gambon, and Charlotte Rampling.  

It is an absorbing novel told from the first person point of view of Ruth Gilmartin in 1976. She discovers that her mother Sally was in fact really called Eve and before she married Sean Gilmartin, she was Eva Delectorskaya. Ruth learns all this from a manuscript her mother drip-feeds her. It’s quite disconcerting to find out that the firm foundation of your childhood is based on something as insubstantial as a myth.

Eva’s story is both interesting and intriguing. She is recruited by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman working for British Intelligence. She undergoes special training in Scotland and then is deployed to Washington DC with a group whose purpose is to bring the Americans into the war and save Britain’s hide.

Then somebody betrays Eva and she goes into hiding. Now, all these years later, she’s sure who the culprit was and she needs her daughter’s help to expose him.

‘Always suspect. Always mistrust.’ Eva lived by these rules and Ruth begins to feel the same way in her workday encounters.

Boyd handles the female perspective well and neatly juxtaposes the past events in Eva’s life with Ruth’s current issues. There’s a brooding menace of betrayal throughout – emphasised by the father of Ruth’s child and Eva’s failure to mistrust.

The wartime period – and the hot summer of 1976 – are captured by Boyd; you’re there, in both worlds, because his writing style is deceptively easy to read yet honed to perfection. He's not too good with the action sequences, though, as the visuals are scant; but we're not reading this for the action but for the characterisation, which is good.

I’ve read earlier books by Boyd and none disappoint [though his later Bond outing (Solo) did, see my comments here].

From this book alone, it’s understandable why he has won a number of writing awards. A pity about the lousy title, though.

 

 

 

SOLO - OH-OH-NO!

Another ‘literary’ author tackles James Bond, following in the recent footsteps of Sebastian Faulks and Jefferey Deaver. I preferred Deaver to Faulks. To all intents and purposes William Boyd continues where Fleming left off as far as the historical timeline goes, so we’re in 1969 and Bond is forty-five.

The first part is uneventful and is unlikely to hook modern-day thriller readers. The tone and style are leisurely, like some of the Bond works, but they held the attention, this barely does that. Apart from a bloody dream/risen memory of D-Day events in France, Bond is not involved in any action. He meets an attractive woman and inadvertently becomes a voyeur. Boyd’s writing a novel, it would seem, not a thriller. I’ve read Boyd’s books and they’re good. This is a disappointment, in contrast.

The next part of Solo quickly sets up Bond to go on a mission to West Africa, to stop a war. Not strictly true, as a civil conflict has been going on for two years, but now it’s dragging on, the military genius in Dahum unexpectedly holding off superior numbers of Zanzarim forces. Bond was to neutralise the military man, Adeka. The background is provided in one of those page-long paragraphs beloved of Fleming.

Bond’s journey into the dark heart of (fictitious) Zanzarim is well told, with plenty of atmosphere and feel for the country (as one would expect from the author of An Ice Cream War). A potential villain materialises about a third of the way into the book – Kobus Breed, the man with two faces; he has an unpleasant method of dealing with dead enemies, but he’s a poor kind of villain for James Bond. There may be other villains, but they’re shadowy figures, barely realised. The women aren’t as striking as Fleming’s, and not as memorable. Some aspects of the Bond character have been captured well, yet others not so: ‘Peering through the (gun)-sight… made him feel like an assassin.’ Odd that, him being a Double-O agent.

There are double crosses, deaths, close shaves and yet the flavour of the originals is not there. Maybe it’s Fleming’s cold sadism, putting his hero through the mill. Yes, Bond gets mauled but it lacks emotional involvement from the reader.  ‘Bond felt that weary heart-sink, that heaviness of loss.’ As far as emotion goes, this is tell, not show. Bond was a world-weary traveller and in this book we only travel from the exotic continent of Africa to Washington DC, from one kind of jungle to another. Maybe the world has shrunk so that there are no longer any places he hasn’t been to (even in 1969)?

Usually, Boyd is good at capturing a period. Sadly, I didn’t get such a strong feel for 1969. Two concessions: an aside about man landing on the moon and also Bond went to view the September 1969 film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; but he left before the end – as if the bed-hopping it concerned palled! This is the year when the UK and Rhodesia severed diplomatic ties (June), a Kenyan minister is assassinated (July), the Prague Spring crushed (August), My Lai massacre arrests (September), Washington protests against Vietnam War (November), all events that would create political and news waves.  

The writing was accomplished in parts, and the narrative just kept me turning the pages, but I couldn’t shake a feeling of anti-climax, because I wasn’t emotionally involved. And I felt the ending was rushed and we were left in the air for the next adventure from Boyd. But, sadly on this offering, I hope not.

Editing comments. No book, mine included, is without error. However, considering the known anticipation and expectation this book engendered, I’d have thought the editors would have tried harder.

p.11. He was searching his pockets for his keys when the door opened… [James Bond doesn’t know where he put his keys? Really? He is a man of habit. Even if distracted, he could find his keys blindfold, I’m sure!]

P19. Bond turned left (in his car) before Richmond Bridge. He went into a post office… [Presumably this was a drive-in post office? Lazy visuals.]

P20. He thought to himself. [He does this a lot, thinking to himself. Who else could he think to? He thought is enough – though even that is superfluous if, as we are, we’re in his POV.]

P32. What age would M be, Bond found himself wondering? [Apart from the misplaced question mark, this is odd. Why is he thinking this now, after all the years he’s worked with M? Padding.]

P73. … deciding to wear… with suede desert boots on his feet.’ [Where else would he wear desert boots?]

P85. … her dark nipples perfectly round, like coins.’ [I suspect Bond meant aureoles rather than nipples? A nipple is the button within the aureole.]

P293. Up to here, most of the chapter headings are similar to the style of Fleming. This one goes amiss, however – ‘A spy on vacation’. It’s short (2 pages) and there is no vacation mentioned!

The pages of plot exposition at the end between Felix and Bond is just too much.

The ending was contrived and illogical. He suspects an intruder, someone out to kill him, might have tracked him to the home of a woman. He decides to write the woman out of his life so she won’t be a target. But it seems a bit late to do that, if the intruder was already aware of her relationship?