[On The Yankee Station comprises] short stories which are, with one exception, formidably accomplished. Like William Boyd's first novel, A Good Man in Africa, they reveal no sign of beginner's fumbling. Several of them have already appeared in various magazines and it is likely that they represent Mr Boyd's literary apprenticeship. Apart from the exception already mentioned, all the tales are assured and expert. The feeling of apprentice work derives not from their quality but from their variety. They include a psychological thriller, a touching story of sexual initiation, a sickening (because of its flawless evocation) study of a napalm-happy American pilot in the Vietnam war and the mechanic who hates him, several pieces about unpleasant fat Englishmen sweating in post-colonial Africa, a first-person memoir (in as seamless an American vernacular as Salinger at his best) by a sometime child star on the skids and several others. The...