Inside every comic fat man there's a serious thin man trying to get out. William Boyd's 'A Good Man in Africa' may not have been the novel for the Eighties it was hailed as (in tone it was a novel of the Fifties), but its flabby, red-haired, heavily perspiring British diplomat, Morgan Leafy, was a memorably funny creation. His second novel, 'An Ice Cream War' (again rather old-fashioned, again compulsively readable), takes as its central figure the slim, nervous, dark-haired would-be aesthete Felix Cobb, who barely raises a smile.

Boyd's subject is the 1914–18 War, his venue the little-known East African front, where German-British hostilities follow a parochial, disorganised but violent course. Those caught up include Temple Smith, an American with a farm near Kilimanjaro; the German couple Erich and Liesl von Bishop; and Felix's brother, the simple, carthorse-like Gabriel, drafted out during his honeymoon. Back home Felix finds...