Wonderful! Boyd is fast becoming my favourite modern English novelist.
I have read this before (don’t know whether an earlier reading is in this list or not). Set initially in Vienna in 1913, Lysander Rief is a young English actor in Vienna (it appears) to seek a cure for his inability to ejaculate! He meets the lovely Miss Bull, who soon cures him of that problem, gets (allegedly) pregnant in the process, and claims to her boyfriend that he raped her.
Lysander is spirited out of Vienna by some early variant of the British Secret Services, finds that he owes them a lot of money for the privilege, and has to work off the debt.
The first world war has now begun and someone in the British civil service is sending the Germans coded details of British troop and munitions movements. Lysander has to find out who. He does, or possibly doesn’t in the end: the book is all about play and play-acting, and sunrise is the time when the truth will be out.
I love some of Boyd’s books — 'An Ice-Cream War', 'Any Human Heart', 'Restless', and this one, but loathed 'Brazzaville Beach' and don’t like his short stories. So there is a bit of a conundrum. I suppose I should try some of the others — 'Armadillo', and 'Ordinary Thunderstorms'. In the ones I like he combines a thriller with a richly populated English (middle or upper class) family saga, and he writes well about the wars.
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