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)

The e-book wars

Some of my books - poets' corner

 

The continuing skirmishing between Amazon and certain book publishers is in the news. There are opinions from those affected – authors, booksellers and publishers, yet there’s an elephant in the room that seems to get ignored.

The big publishers price their new e-books too high, doubtless knowing that the fans of the best-seller authors will buy regardless, thus boosting their profits.

The business model quoted in a Sunday paper gives us this example:

Printed book

40% of cover-price goes to the retailer, such as Amazon, or bookshop.

60% goes to the publisher (two-thirds of which goes on production (paper, printing, pulping unsold books, transport) [doesn’t mention warehousing], with 5-10% of the price going to the author.

E-book

30% to Amazon

70% to the publisher with 17.5% of the cover price going to the author.

That’s the simplified model, anyway.

Obviously, some of these percentages will differ, depending on the author and the publisher agreements. But the principle probably holds. Bottom line is that publishers and retailers are in a business and need to make a profit.

Producing a book has a lot of costs attached, though not mentioned specifically in the example above. For instance, editing, page format setting up (should be minimal in the digital age), cover design, marketing (if any).

So, let’s assume the publisher is justified in getting 40% (two-thirds of 60%) for print, which includes paper, printing, etc. That still means 20% is left over for – the author? No, the author gets 5-10%, if he or she is lucky. So some percentage (10-15%) is sort of floating somewhere… Maybe that’s the publisher’s profit? Hmm…

Now, for the e-book, there are no paper, print, delivery, warehousing, pulping, and transport costs. So why does the publisher get 70% of the cover price?  If the author gets that 17.5% (many don’t get nearly as much), that means the publisher gets 52.5% and Amazon gets 30%. If the publisher doesn’t spend on print, paper, printing etc for this version, then that 40% is ‘unclaimed’ by any process for the e-book model. Of course, subsumed within though not quoted must be the editing, layout, setting up, cover design, marketing… which is necessary for the print book anyway. So if, as is usual, the majority of books from the publisher are both print and e-book, those costs are already accounted for in the print model so shouldn’t be deducted from any percentage in the e-book model. Yes, setting up an e-book requires additional work, but it’s fairly basic and cannot account for that 40% slice. Whatever way you cut it, the costs of producing an e-book are negligible and don’t warrant the high price.

 
There is probably something else at work here. If the price of the e-book was lowered to a realistic level, then that might affect print sales. At present a new hardback and e-book are only about $5 apart in pricing (a hasty straw poll on the B&N site). People who prefer print books will be content to pay that extra; but they might baulk if the difference were greater. So it could be argued that the artificially high e-book price is to protect the sales of the hardbacks.

Whatever side of the fence we sit on, I suspect that authors – the originators, the people who effectively create the books – are unlikely to see percentages improve in royalties any time soon.

[This view concentrates on the big publishing conglomerates, not the independent presses who quickly grasped that e-books sell better if priced low. Certain assisted-publishers/vanity publishers tend to price their e-books as high as the big publishers’ model, thus denying their writers a viable outlet.]