Interview: William Boyd, author of Waiting for Sunrise

He got to the Freud Museum early. On the way in to 19 Bergasse, past the parked cars and the bustle of the cafe across the road, there hadn’t seemed to be anything particularly different about the five-storey late 19th- century building in central Vienna where Freud both lived and had his practice. But once past the heavy oak door and up a flight of white stone stairs, the noisome 21st century seemed to fall away. And when he looked out of the windows at the inner courtyard…

Ask William Boyd what sparked off his tenth novel, Waiting for Sunrise, and that’s the moment he describes. “I just felt this Proustian shiver. I was on the landing outside Professor Doctor Freud’s consulting rooms. Because it looked as though nothing had changed since he was there, I thought, what it must have been like to be a patient there, outside the door, waiting to see him.”

That’s when it started, he says, that endless question and answer session he has to have with himself to concoct a credible and substantial something out of nothing. What was the man doing there? Who was he? What was the problem he was seeking to cure? What was his job, his nationality? And always – at least for the two years it takes him to plan a novel – that simplest and hardest question of all: what happened next?

Everything about Boyd’s life tells you how good he is at working out the answers: the vineyard in Bergerac, the CBE, the art-ridden house in Chelsea all have their roots in his ability to tell a tale with intelligence and flair. In person, he doesn’t disappoint: he is every bit the affable, urbane raconteur you might expect him to be. At 59, he is, still as passionate about writing as he has ever been.

He’d written about Vienna before he visited it – just as he had with LA, Berlin and Lisbon. What finally took him there was his fascination with the art of Egon Schiele (1890-1918) – and the massive collection of his art at the Leopold Museum. It was while staying in Vienna to write a piece about the Leopold Museum four years ago that he went to see Freud’s consulting rooms – and the idea for the novel notched itself on his imagination.

Maybe, he concedes, it was just being in Vienna itself – that resolutely unmodern city where the roots of modernism go deeper than anywhere else – that did the trick. “There’s something incredible about this stiff, proper, bourgeois capital – a city which, just before the First World War, contained so many incredible minds that were breaking barriers, not just in psychoanalysis but art, music, journalism, philosophy, architecture. It’s an extraordinary confluence – a far richer brew than anyhere apart from, I suppose, Florence under the Medicis. Then again, on top of all that, you have Adolf Hitler walking the streets as a vagrant. Trotsky lives there for six or seven years before the war. Stalin spends two months there in 1913. It’s a curious focus of everything that is going to shape the whole course of the 20th century.”

In Waiting for Sunrise, the man Boyd envisages nervously waiting for an appointment with a Viennese psychiatrist (not Freud, as it happens, though he will have a walk-on part) is Lysander Rief, the actor son of a British actor-manager. And the trajectory Boyd set for him as he pieced together the skeleton of plot would require Rief not just to be an actor, but to be a spy, a soldier and a lover too.

The outbreak of the First World War takes care of at least a couple of those identities. Boyd has written about the war previously and it is also the subject of The Trench (1999), his first film as a director, for which he also wrote the screenplay.

“The First World War is another of my obsessions. It’s part family lore – my grandfather was wounded at the third battle of Ypres and my great-uncle won a medal at the Somme – but I think it is because that war just resonates so strongly with the British, more even than the French and the Germans. But I have always thought that the 20th century really began sometime between 1914 and 1918, and so Lysander’s progress through the novel moves from Edwardian certainty to 20th century uncertainty and doubt. Vienna and the war are the perfect crucible to examine the rise of modernism, and show how the people who survived the war were so vastly different from the people who began the century in 1900.”

What he needed, though, was a new way of writing about the war. He found it in the memoirs of a former railway administrator who ran the wartime Directorate of Movements. Here, in page after page of bureaucratic detail, was the logistics of total war. In the novel, some of these plans are clearly being leaked to the enemy and Rief – half-Austrian, with accentless German – is charged with finding out who is doing the leaking.

The logistics of, for example, merely finding forage for the hundreds of thousands of horses, made Boyd look on the war in a different light. “You realise that in order to get the bullet to the rifle, somebody has to construct a railway spur and a depot and waterproof the buildings. In a way, that sort of detail is as disturbing as hand-to-hand conflict, because it is so planned, scientific and calculated. When you think about it, though, this happens in every war. How many millions of bottles of Evian water, for example, must have been shipped off to Iraq and Afghanistan?”

At this point in the story Lysander Rief has much in common with Eva Delektorskaya, central protagonist of Boyd’s novel Restless, which won the Costa Book of the Year in 2007 and which will be filmed by the BBC this June (as ever, he’s written the screenplay too). Both characters are spies, both have to uncover treachery at a high level within their own ranks, and both have to change their identity at least a couple of times.

“That’s precisely the reason the spy is such a fascinating figure – not just to me but to all manner of serious novelists. Because lying, duplicity and identity shifting are such currency in our own lives, the spy novel becomes a metaphor for the human condition. We all use benign duplicity to smooth our passage through this vale of tears; everyone understands it.

“That’s one reason I am so attracted to this idea of loss of identity, change of identity and the question of how many identities we have. Do we change every time we have a new encounter? Are we endlessly mutable? I think these are fascinating questions: it’s a rich vein to tap and I don’t think I have exhausted it fully yet. And of course, it is why I have made Lysander an actor too.”

The malleability of the self was something Boyd explored in depth in his superlative Any Human Heart, which used the fictional journal intime of the central character, Logan Mountstuart, to illustrate how profoundly different we are – even to ourselves, even just in our writing style – in the course of a lifetime. Lysander Rief, too, keeps a diary in which to express his thoughts and chart the progress of the hypnotherapy course he is taking in Vienna. Given that it takes the reader right inside a character’s mind, I’m surprised how few novelists write entirely in this form: indeed Valery Larbaud, the dandy and Vichy water heir who first translated Ulysses into French, is the only other writer Boyd knows of who has done this.

That interiority is central to Boyd’s novels: without them, they would be well crafted and superbly researched thrillers but wouldn’t stick as easily in the mind. Yet in any film adaptation, this can be one of the first casualties. “With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity – voiceover, the camera’s point of view, good acting – but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph. Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes – which can be fantastic – but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel it doesn’t even get close.”

He has, he says, just been trying to adapt his last novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, for film. “It’s incredibly difficult. That’s a 400-page novel but it’s crammed with stuff, so it’s really 600 pages. Everything I write I am always trying to pour a quart into a pint pot. There’s always a lot going on in my novels, they’re never lean and spare.

“I have always thought if you are going to make a film it’s much better to have an original script that will play to film’s strengths. But the industry always wants adaptations – 75 per cent of the films that get made are adaptations – and the craft of adapting is rather different from the art of writing a novel. So yes, while I’m sure you could carve out a film from Waiting for Sunrise, it would be a different animal altogether.”

He’s right. The last fifth of Waiting for Sunrise is as densely plotted as most whole novels, so that might have to go. Showing the masses of materiel lining up on Britain’s docksides bound for the Flanders trenches would probably cost too much, even with computer-generated images. But a man walking up the white stone steps steps to a psychiatrist’s apartments in 1913 Vienna? Yes, perhaps film could manage that. But take my advice: try the novel first.

• Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd is published this week by Bloomsbury, priced £18.99.