"After Evelyn Waugh came Kingsley Amis; after Amis, Tom Sharpe; after Sharpe, William Boyd"; so enthused one reviewer over William Boyd's first novel, A Good Man in Africa. The dust-jacket of his new, second novel, An Ice Cream War—also set in Africa—places him as a term in a very different and much more old-fashioned progression. "Boyd has taken some of the story-telling and narrative conventions of the novel of colonial adventure—as practised by P. C. Wren, John Buchan and Rider Haggard—and used them for his own subversive ends." In other words, he has changed his spots and has followed a satire by a historical novel, set against the background of the East African campaign of the First World War, when a British army chased a German army commanded by von Lettow-Vorbeck up and down East Africa for four years without achieving any particular success...