Lysander Rief is a young actor in Vienna who has come to the city to seek a psychiatric cure for an illness – anorgasmia – from an English doctor, Bensimon.

Whilst sitting in the waiting room, he encounters Captain Alwyn Munro DSO, an English friend of Dr Bensimon's, and a Miss Hettie Bull who is another patient.

War breaks out and Lysander decides to join up as a Private in the 2/5th (service) battalion of the East Sussex Light Infantry regiment; he is appointed translator at a German internment camp in Bishop's Bay, Wales.

Fyfe-Miller, an enigmatic naval officer and Munro introduce him to their superior, Colonel Massinger, and his is instructed by them to travel to Geneva posing as a Swiss railway engineer to discover the identity of a traitor passing on military intelligence to the Germans.

Rief singles out one of the officers as a likely candidate and trails his movements, finding out that he is known to his mother, Lady Anna Faulkner, who is now running the very successful Claverleigh Hall War Fund following her husband's death.

The novel reaches its climax in the closing pages as Rief hunts down his suspect, finally confronting him on a fierce, windy morning on Hampstead Heath.

[2] For the novel, Boyd created his own version of psychotherapy called "parallelism", which he "pinched from the writing of the American poet Wallace Stevens", stating that it would be "much more fun to think up my own".

[9] NPR overall panned the book, criticizing the "elaborate plots, Freudian subtexts and creaky mechanics" that "overwhelmed the more subtle and elemental task of good novel writing.