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. No, I didn’t know what it was, either. Let’s put it this way: when it comes to sexual intercourse, young Lysander can proceed to the finishing post but has a problem, er, crossing the line.

As luck would have it, Rief encounters a brazen seductress in his psychiatrist’s waiting room who has soon cured our hero of his unusual sexual hang-up. They embark upon a steamy affair, but before long he has been arrested for a crime he did not commit. With the connivance of the British embassy, Rief goes on the run, returning to England with plans to revive his career as an actor.