Our man in Vienna

Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers.

Believe me, in the exalted literary company Boyd keeps, that kind of generosity of spirit is as rare as hen’s teeth (try asking Sebastian or Salman for a jacket quote and see how far it gets you). So I’m not about to give Boyd a stinking review. Waiting for Sunrise could have been a sub-Da Vinci Code catastrophe, and I would still have felt obliged to describe it as ‘a compelling and heartbreaking masterpiece from one of the great storytellers of the age’.

Luckily, I’m off the hook. The new novel is superb; hand-on-heart, may-the-Lord-strike-me-down terrific. It opens in Vienna in 1913, where a callow Englishman of 25, named Lysander Rief, has gone in search of a psychiatric cure for anorgasmia.