"An Ice Cream War" by William Boyd

 Two English brothers from the upper-classes, and an American, get caught up in a side-show of the First World War, the fighting between German and British East Africa. Of course the warring powers are both colonialists and both societies are alien invaders of African lands. But the overall message of this book is that human beings are tossed and turned by the tides of history. From the very start, one of the minor characters is described as shoulderless: "From the back, his silhouette resembled a pawn in a game of chess." (2.2) As Felix realises: "it was futile to expect that life could in some way be controlled. But surely everyone had some vestigial power to influence things at his disposal?" (4.3) And as Temple reflects in the Epilogue: "Life doesn’t run on railway tracks. It doesn’t always go the way you expect." 

The blurb describes this as a black comedy. It certainly had overtones of Evelyn Waugh's comic novels (eg the appallingly racist and unfunny Black Mischief) and, like them, I did not find it very funny. Bizarre things happen, certainly, but at best I found them mildly amusing. Mea culpa perhaps. As I have said before in this blog, I don't get comic novels. I don't do surreal, either. The only thing I laughed at was the ludicrous conversations between Felix and Gilzean, who spoke broad, and broadly incomprehensible, Scots. I don't normally like untranslated foreign language in a novel but this was meant to puzzle, so it fitted.

It certainly doesn't have the biting anti-war anger and savage surreal humour of Joseph Heller's Catch 22. It was much more subdued. Perhaps the names were significant: Felix was lucky and Charis had charm but I'm not sure how angelic Gabriel was.

So I treated it more or less as a normal novel.

It is told in the third person and the past tense from a multi-person perspective, head-hopping chapter by chapter. This enabled the reader to get into the head of the principal characters, mostly Felix, Charis, Gabriel, Liesl and Temple. Some of these characters are killed off before the end of the novel and none of them truly develop as characters in the conventional way of novels because fundamentally what happens to them occurs through the promptings of fate or some joker god, and in despite of their characters. This gives the book a strange un-novel-like feel. Heroes are supposed to be masters of their own fate. This lot aren't. It resembled, for me, The Iliad, another war nook in which the heroes are the playthings of the gods.

I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it. I found it quite heavy going at the start. I suppose one felt sorry for the gauche Felix and the innocent lovers Gabriel and Charis and I suppose all the characters were made harder by their experiences of war. Towards the end I was quite interested. But I never really invested emotionally in any character so the horror was not as horrific as it might otherwise have been. 

Selected quotes:

• "Wheech-Browning suddenly leapt four feet sideways leaving the two flies circling aimlessly in the space he had occupied a second before. It took them a moment to find him again." (2.1)
• "He was the sort of man, Temple often thought, whose weakness was a kind of challenge: it made you want to punch him in the chest, just to prove you weren’t affected by it." (2.2)
• "There was a delicate spattering sound as bits of expressed brain hit the leaves of the bushes behind the man." (2.6)
• "Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it didn’t possess." (2.6)
• "Nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events." (2.6)
• "The British. He shook his head in a mixture of rage and admiration. A general who was an alcoholic, an army resembling the tribes of Babel, and everyone milling around on this arid plain without the slightest idea of what they were meant to be doing." (2.12)
• "Over to the right were temporary hangars, little more than canvas awnings, that provided some shade for the two frail biplanes – BE2 Cs – which at the moment constituted the presence of the Royal Flying Corps in East Africa." (2.12)
• "There was no breeze and the air was clinging and felt over-used, as if, Felix said, it was composed of exhalations only. All the people of the world breathing out at once." (2.13)
• "A magnificent pale Bathsheba, heavy-breasted and full-thighed, glistening palely in the lamplight as the buckets of water were tipped over her, while he looked on, captivated, an impotent David in the shadows outside." (2.15)
• "It was curious, he thought, how the touch of your own hand on your genitals was so reassuring." (2.15)
• "The sense of his own responsibility, so successfully evaded for so many months, hit him with full force." (2.17)
• "The man had a poor, crude-looking face, as if it were an early prototype whose features hadn’t yet been properly refined. It was utterly expressionless, as if this too were a faculty reserved for later, more sophisticated models." (3.1)
• "There was also something thoroughgoing and uncompromising about African rain. It came down with real force, each drop weighty and loaded with full wetting potential, drumming down at speed as if falling from a prodigious height." (3.1)
• "His ludicrous ‘quest’ had fizzled out in the mud of Kibongo, his high ideals and passionate aspirations replaced by grumbles about the damp and endless speculation about what to eat." (3.2)
• "What kind of a war was this? he demanded angrily to himself. No enemy in sight, your men slowly being starved to death, guarding a huddle of grass huts in the middle of a sodden jungle?" (3.2)
• "He was full of retrospective wisdom, twenty-twenty vision as far as his hindsight was concerned." (4.3)

October 2021

This novel was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982.

Also by this author: Waiting for Sunshine and Trio

Also set during the world war one fighting in East Africa: by Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gonfur

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God