A spy in the mind's eye

Koosi (author’s cat) investigates William Boyd.

MANILA, Philippines - The title of William Boyd’s new book is Waiting for Sunrise and its hero does spend a lot of time huddled in the dark, anticipating but half-dreading the light. This is a novel of shadows: unconscious desires, concealment, disguise, deception.

We meet Lysander Rief in Vienna in 1913 as he hurries to his appointment with his psychiatrist, and immediately we are alerted to his alienness. “He is in his late twenties, almost handsome in a conventional way, but your eye is drawn to him because he is hatless, an anomaly in this busy crowd…” He has come to consult the English Dr. Bensimon, a disciple of Freud’s, on a problem of a sexual nature (not impotence, possibly worse). Vienna of course is the psychoanalytical capital of the world, and capital of the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire. Beneath the city’s civilized façade, the author tells us, flows “the river of sex.”

Freud said there are no accidents, and in this novel everything has meaning. Rief spots a poster torn off a wall — what remains of it is the image of a cowering, scantily-clad woman, a reptilian tail, and a fragment “P ERS” from the title of an opera. “He had no idea what the context of this image was as everything else had been torn away.” Thus deftly summing up the human condition and the work of psychoanalysis.

The psychologist is a proponent of “Parallelism”— our memories, he says, are fictions we’ve told ourselves, which become true with repetition. He advises Rief to reimagine his past and replace the painful parts with stories he can live with. (Movies were still a novelty at the time and had not yet achieved their full escapist potential.) This course of treatment is not far from what Rief does for a living: he’s an actor on the London stages, fleshing out parallel realities.

Before long Rief is well enough to have a passionate affair with Hettie Bull, an English actress he meets in the psychiatrist’s waiting room. It is not advisable to have sex with a fellow patient, Rief finds when he gets thrown (politely) in jail on trumped-up charges. Luckily another fellow patient, a British military attach named Munro, helps Rief to escape back to London.

Subsequent events lead the reader to reassess the role of luck in Rief’s life. When World War I breaks out Munro reminds him of his debt to Her Majesty’s government and recruits him as a spy. Psychoanalysis, acting and espionage — they’re cousins, if not sisters.

To build his cover Rief goes on a mission in the trenches of Belgium — his spymasters assure him he’s in no real danger; he nearly dies. Now presumed dead, he proceeds to Geneva for his real mission. Once again his skills at improvisation and disguise serve him well. He marvels at how easily the work comes to him.

But his most perilous assignment awaits in what seems the most boring of all possible locations: the Directorate of Movements at the War Office. In airless rooms with mountains of paperwork, Rief must identify the mole they’ve nicknamed “Andromeda.”

 The torn poster at the beginning of the novel is for a little-known opera called Perseus and Andromeda. In Greek mythology Andromeda was a princess whom the gods ordered chained to a rock to be devoured by the sea monster Cetus.

 One of the many pleasures of reading Waiting for Sunrise is Boyd’s prose: literary but never stuck-up, beautiful without admiring itself. Another is the thrill of seeing the context emerge from the recurring images and motifs — it’s novel-writing as a kind of psychoanalysis. This is a thriller whose methods are as thrilling as its plot.

 Early on, Dr. Bensimon advises Rief to keep a journal: a proper leather-bound notebook with fine paper, a true record of his mind, with a formal title. This device allows us to hear from Rief himself — his dreams, fleeting thoughts, bits of poetry, things that intrigue and stimulate him. While the hero navigates the dimly lit byways of early 20th century history we take a tour through his mind.

Reading Waiting for Sunrise recalls the excitement of reading comics as a child, in a dark room, under a blanket with a flashlight, listening for the footfalls of adults coming to check if you’re asleep.

The Geneva chapters remind me of the Ashenden spy stories by W. Somerset Maugham, and the later London chapters of Graham Greene. I am thrilled to learn that the estate of Ian Fleming has invited William Boyd to write the next James Bond novel. Fleming himself appears as a character in Boyd’s earlier novel Any Human Heart. And Boyd has written screenplays for films that starred Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, three actors who played Bond.

“The idea that these somewhat random connections with Fleming and Bond should culminate in my writing a new James Bond novel is irresistibly appealing,” Boyd said.

A certain doctor in Vienna would say there are no accidents.