This second novel by William Boyd [An Ice Cream War] confounds but does not disappoint the expectations raised by his first. Heartlessly farcical, A Good Man in Africa was the brightest work of fiction to emerge from the dark continent since Waugh's Black Mischief. Although it was in no way messy in shape or sloppy in writing, it was one of those books which, products of exuberant improvisation rather than of rigorous planning, seem, like Waugh's own early novels, to have spurted from their creators' imaginations in a single, glittering jet.

In contrast, An Ice Cream War obviously could not have been written without a vast amount of patient digging for information. Prefacing it, there are first a letter written from Nairobi by a member of the East African Railway Volunteer Force to his sister in October 1914 and then a map of the area of East Africa, stretching...