A woman is only a woman, said Kipling, but a good cigar is a smoke. Freud tended to disagree: a woman was both more and less than she seemed (both more and less than a human being, come to that). But - sometimes, at least - a cigar was just a cigar. I'm often reminded of Kipling's words when I hear books being described as "reads." The term is meant to suggest a certain frictionless pleasure; it is offered up in apparently unalloyed praise for a book's sleek marketability. But it sounds oddly discourteous to me, like the Irish locution "ride" to denote an attractive person of the opposite sex. And can you really have pleasure without a bit of friction? Don't we want the books we read to rub off a little in the reading, to leave some spoor or spraint of memory or disquiet behind? William Boyd writes "reads." He is also widely praised as a "master storyteller," as if there were some Storyteller's Guild still up and running somewhere in the City and he'd spent the requisite decade apprenticed to it. Waiting for Sunrise is a gripping story - a First World War espionage thriller in which a splendidly named actor, Lysander Rief, is set to work unmasking a traitor in the Directorate of Movements. It is prefaced by a rather different story, tracing the same actor's experience of psychoanalysis and courtly love in pre-war Vienna. Under hypnosis he discloses a (somewhat belated) primal scene in which he imagines the plot of Atonement by Ian McEwan, making a convenient mechanical carry the can for a shameful episode in puberty. Then the expatriate sculptor Hettie Bull, the Zuleika Dobson of the Ringstrasse, small of stature but hugely alluring, a woman who puts the "nymph" into "nymphomaniac," brings some hypnotic powers of her own to bear on the powerless thesp. There's an evident parallel to be drawn between analysis and spookery: the truffling for secrets, the false confidences, the codes and symbols. In Waiting for Sunrise it's a little overdrawn, if you ask me. There's a lot of business with hats which is supposed to be all hermeneutic and nuanced in the Viennese part, and to drive the plot in fairly straightforward ways in the thriller part. The clichés of psychoanalysis (we lie to ourselves in order to believe the lies we tell to others; you don't have to be a madwoman to be good at sex but it helps; it's all Mother's fault in the end) segue into those of clenchjawed genre fiction. The first and last pages of the book are both done in the second person, addressing us as if we have just happened to spot Lysander going about his business, first in Vienna, then in London; and asking us what we notice about him, as if we were field agents being briefed by HQ, or recent recruits to the Tavistock Institute lighting out across the tempest tossed seas of the human unconscious for the first time. It is all highly effective, if a little... frictionless. Set against this is some pretty solid craftsmanship. The sense of place is remarkable, just the right side of laborious - by the time you have got through the Viennese sections, you'll never look at a Sachertorte again. London under the shadow of war is sombre with soot and nacreous with rain, its theatres filled with jittery laughter as Zeppelins putter mournfully overhead like basking sharks. Boredom and fear coexist in the beige corridors of the Ministry, no less than the more obviously nightmarish trenches. And the book is not without success in its knitting together of the two themes. Lysander is an intriguing variant on the archetypal flawed hero in that his flaws are of rather more interest than his heroics. The final resolution of the plot (achieved via the business end of a highpowered rifle) doesn't bring him any sort of serenity. He has a knack for getting away with things, often by deflecting pain or blame on to innocent bystanders. And there is nothing more haunting or corrosive than persistently getting away with things, as we know. by William Boyd Buy this book now from Telegraph Books