Waiting for sunrise who is andromeda

I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile. View my complete profile. William Boyd, Waiting for Sunrise Bloomsbury. I saw some discussion somewhere recently about how and why a new novel by William Boyd is not quite regarded in the same league as an event like a new one by Julian Barnes, Ian MacEwan or Alan Hollinghurst.

But he's simply not as 'good'. He is not quite as 'literary'. He is not quite in the same league. This is another fine entertainment, full of interest, imagination and fine writing but, like Ordinary Thunderstorms , it is episodic with the twists and turns required of an adventure story. Not only does one wonder if disbelief needs to be suspended- and one needs to suspend it willingly- but for once I remembered the Classical unities of Time, Place and Action and considered their benefits.

Not having been a WW1 spy, it's not for me to comment on the likeliness of the story because I'm sure that some very unlikely things did happen. Also, although the book seems to unfold with alarming turns of events, it must have been plotted from the start and not just made up as it went along.

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content William Boyd is the author of one of the best spy books of the last decade, Restless , a story of espionage in Nazi occupied France and the subsequent ramifications of a great betrayal.

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Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. He's young, "almost conventionally handsome", clean-shaven, well-tailored, and broad of shoulder.

He is, according to the narrator of Waiting for Sunrise, a bit of a fake. Nonetheless, in the course of the novel, he finds himself embroiled in sexual scandals, daring escapes, a stolen libretto, international espionage, a shooting on a ferry, a Zeppelin raid, a brace of femmes fatales, the trenches of the Western Front and a mission to unmask a traitor code-named Andromeda.

Lysander is not a spy, a soldier or a professional adventurer. He's just a not-very-good actor, recently seen on the London stage as "second leading man" in The Amorous Ultimatum. The reason he's in Vienna in is nothing to do with the imminent war. He's there to ask one of a new breed of Viennese doctors, a psychiatrist called Bensimon, to cure his chronic inability to climax during sex. He's a poet, a dreamer, a bit of a drip. But as the book gets under way, the plot propels him into action, faster and faster.

At the clinic, he meets Hettie Bull, an Englishwoman with olive skin and pale hazel eyes. Meeting him again in the street, Hettie reveals that she's a sculptor and asks him to model for her. With a certain inevitability Lysander is always being propositioned by women they start a passionate affair. One morning, he is arrested by police, apparently betrayed by Hettie, and charged with rape.

He faces 10 years in jail. With the help of a diplomat called Munro, he escapes from a villa in the grounds of the British Embassy, heads for Trieste and home. Hardly has he time to catch breath, and bed his co-star in Strindberg's Miss Julie, than war is declared. He signs up impulsively with the East Sussex Light Infantry, but the Viennese embassy chap Munro, and his deputy Fyfe-Miller, suddenly re-appear to explain that he's being sent on a special mission. There's a traitor in British high command.

Coded messages to the enemy have been intercepted in Geneva; he must go there, and find the key. But first he must be "disappeared" — reported missing in action at the front line of the British Expeditionary Forces in France