The master storyteller: William Boyd interview

William Boyd talks about blurring fact and fiction, the hoax that fooled the art world, and his new book, Waiting for Sunrise 

William Boyd in Vienna, the setting of his new novel, Waiting for Sunrise Photo: Jens Umbach

By Mick Brown

04 Feb 2012

William Boyd’s new book, Waiting for Sunrise, begins in Vienna in 1913, at the dawn of the new 'science’ of psychoanalysis. It tells the story of Lysander Rief, a young English actor who has sought the help of one Dr Bensimon, a disciple of Freud, for a sexual problem. ('It usually is,’ the doctor notes. 'At root…’)

Rief’s problem stems from an incident in adolescence when he is discovered by his mother in the garden, naked, having masturbated. In order to disguise his shame and embarrassment, he invents a story about having been assaulted by the gardener’s son – leading to the dismissal of both the son and the gardener.

The remedy that Dr Bensimon suggests is his own technique of 'Parallelism’. 'The world is in essence neutral – flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance,’ Bensimon explains. 'It’s us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want. In theory.’

Boyd, famously, is in the practice of mixing fiction and fact to the point where the two often seem inseparable: in his best-known novel, Any Human Heart, he assigned walk-on roles to characters as various as Ernest Hemingway and the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson; and Joseph Conrad and Freud himself make fleeting appearances in the new book.

One almost thinks that Bensimon might have existed, and that Parallelism was indeed some exotic by-product of early Freudian analysis. 'I suspect I’m going to be getting letters from people asking me to recommend a therapist,’ Boyd says.
Full story at The Telegraph.