An Ice-Cream War
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| An Ice-Cream War | |
| Author | William Boyd |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Vintage |
| Publication date | 1982 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0375705023 |
An Ice-Cream War (1982) is William Boyd's second novel. It was nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction in the year of its publication.
[edit] Plot summary
An Ice-Cream War delves into the clashes between British and German forces in the East Africa campaigns of the First World War. The historical and military material of this book is recreated in vibrant detail, and in his intense descriptive passages Boyd brings out the full colour and desolation of the ravaged landscape of Tanzania. European and American settlers in Eastern Africa, once friendly neighbors, reluctantly turned to enemies.
The background of the novel is the amazing success of German lieutenant colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (not much portrayed in the story), who commanded Germany's tiny, undersupplied African force (mostly African soldiers). He inflicted embarrassing losses on British forces at Tanga, and tied down Allied forces that outnumbered his own by at least 10 to 1 for the duration of the war. [1]
The African scenes are intercut with episodes set in Kent, in the south of England, and the parallel stories of two brothers, Gabriel and Felix Cobb, whose lives change irreparably as they are drawn, one after the other, into the war. The quiet civility of Edwardian England contrasts starkly with the confusion and panic of the Africa conflict, experienced first-hand by Gabriel, as he leads his regiment into an attack on the town of Tanga:
| “ | Nothing today had been remotely how he had imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events. Here he was, strolling about the battlefield looking for his missing company like a mother searching for lost children in the park. | ” |
When Gabriel is taken prisoner, his brother Felix searches for him in an African landscape transformed into an absurd nightmare of squalor, insects, torrential rain and countless human casualties. And the novel swings ultimately from romance to elegy, providing a brilliant evocation of the long reach of war behind the front lines and into ordinary domestic existence.[2]
The novel evokes suggestions of the early Evelyn Waugh as a critic of The New York Times wrote at its time of publication:
| “ | Its characters - the survivors in particular - are mercilessly knocked about by the force of historical circumstance: by the war, by the problems of commanding men whose culture they do not understand and whose language they do not even speak, by the influenza epidemic that followed immediately upon the Armistice. But Mr. Boyd sees even domestic life, as Gabriel's and Felix's mother sees her marriage, as a relentless challenge, an unending struggle against appalling adverse conditions to get her own way. That bleak comic vision suggests the early Evelyn Waugh, and An Ice-Cream War is a good enough novel, for all its flaws, to persuade me that Mr. Boyd, who was born in 1952, may someday write a great one.[3] | ” |
