It was a full time job getting your own back on the world, he reasoned; you couldn’t afford to weaken…

It made him sick, he hated every fucking one of them…

His scalp crawled with hatred…
(Morgan Leafy, the comic antihero of A Good Man in Africa, in characteristically misanthropic mode, on pages 51, 72 and 236)

This was Boyd’s first novel, published in 1981. Since then he’s gone on to write an enormous amount – 17 novels, five short story collections, three plays and an impressive 16 movie screenplays. His novels have been translated into 30 languages and he was awarded a CBE in 2005. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what success looks like for a British writer.

Public school

Like so many Brits who write about the British Empire, Boyd was born in a then-imperial colony (Gold Coast/Ghana) where he spent his boyhood, before being packed off to one of the best public schools back in Blighty, and then on to Oxbridge. Let’s just quote his Wikipedia article to get the facts out of the way:

Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, capital of the Gold Coast, (present-day Ghana) to Scottish parents, both from Fife. His father – Alexander, a doctor specialising in tropical medicine – and mother – a teacher – moved to the Gold Coast in 1950 to run the health clinic at the University College of the Gold Coast, now the University of Ghana. In the early 1960s the family moved to western Nigeria, where Boyd’s father held a similar position at the University of Ibadan. Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria but, at the age of nine, went to a preparatory school and then to Gordonstoun school in Scotland; after that, to the University of Nice in France, followed by the University of Glasgow (where he gained an M.A. in English and Philosophy) and finally Jesus College, Oxford.

A Good Man in Africa

A Good Man in Africa is a comedy, in the tradition of Kingsley Amis and the umpteen other British comic writers who specialise in novels about bumbling, fat, drunken, lecherous English plonkers. The book’s comic antihero, Morgan Leafy, is a fat (15 stone), bumbling drunk with a chip on his shoulder against the whole world, who gets into all kinds of comic scrapes.

Leafy works for the Foreign Office’s Diplomatic Corps and has been posted for nearly three years to a city called Nkongsamba, the only town of any size in a small state of a fictional West African country named Kinjanja, ‘a godforsaken, insignificant spot’ (p.27). All the serious embassies and consulates are in the capital, four hours’ drive away ‘on a deathtrap road’ (p.35).

Leafy is consumed by anger, hatred and vengeful thoughts against everyone. He dislikes his immediate boss at the British Deputy High Commission, the Deputy High Commissioner Arthur Fanshawe (I think Deputy High Commission indicates that it’s not the main High Commission, which is off in the capital), and absolutely loathes his immediate junior, Secondary Secretary Richard ‘Dickie’ Dalmire. The latter because he has enjoyed all the advantages in life which Leafy didn’t, namely: public school, Oxford, owns a property in the UK (inherited), was given a place abroad immediately after passing the Foreign Office exams, unlike Leafy who had to repeatedly retake the exams, eventually only scraping through, and then being allotted a godawful job in Kingsway.

The novel opens with Leafy’s resentful anger reaching nuclear proportions, because his enemy, ‘Dickie’ Dalmire, has just popped into his office to casually tell him that he, Dalmire, is engaged to the lovely Priscilla, daughter of their boss, Fanshawe. Leafy had taken Priscilla out a few times and thought he was still in a chance for her hand, so his resentment and jealousy goes off the scale. While trying to appear calm during the conversation, he imagines a nuclear bomb falling on Nkongsamba and incinerating everyone (p.19). He even hates the sun because all the other Brits develop lovely, even tans, but the tropical sun just brings Leafy out in thousands of disjointed freckles and a rash (p.19).

Date

At one point Leafy says his widow’s peak risks making him look like one of those ‘demented American marines, currently wasting the inhabitants of South-East Asia’ (p.43); later he picks up a magazine at the airport which contains photos of GIs in Vietnam (p.96) and mentions how the Americans are tied up in Vietnam (p.184). Now, since the last American soldier left Vietnam in March 1973 the novel must be set before then, in the early 1970s (?)

Cast

Page references are either to where a character first appears or, more often, to a page with a good first description.

• Morgan Leafy, First Secretary at the High Commission in Nkongsamba, comic antihero, failure, inadequate, seething with anger and frustration at the endless humiliations he seems to be subjected to – ‘scathing misanthropy’ (p.19), ‘selfish, fat and misanthropic’ (p.66)
• Richard ‘Dickie’ Dalmire, his junior at the High Commission, mid-twenties (p.51)
• Deputy High Commissioner Arthur Fanshawe (p.29)
• Priscilla Fanshawe, the Deputy High Commissioner’s attractive daughter (p.32), first impressions (p.98), Leafy is obsessed with her magnificent pert breasts which compensate for her ‘ski lift nose’
• Denzil Jones, the (Welsh) Commission accountant, shiny fat face, pale sickly wife and two pale sickly kids, Gareth and Bronwyn (p.52)
• Dr Alex Murray, Head of the Nkongsamba University Health Service and physician to the Commission (pages 47 and 58)
• Sam Adekunle, Professor of Economics and Business Management at the University of Nkongsamba, and leading figure in the Kinjanjan National Party (KNP), a big man given to wearing traditional costume, perfect English tinged with American from Harvard Business School (p.56) owner of muttonchop whiskers (p.116), beefy, he looks like an African Henry VIII
• Kojo, Leafy’s secretary/assistant, a small Roman Catholic with three children (p.23)
• Peter, Commission driver
• Mrs Bryce, wife of a geologist at the university who acts as Fanshawe’s secretary
• Chloe Fanshawe, wife of the Deputy High Commissioner
• Moses, one of Leafy’s two servants, his ‘aged cook’ (p.63)
• Friday, Leafy’s servant (p.35) from Dahomey (modern-day Benin), early 20s, speaks French and erratic English (p.50), ‘hopelessly inept’ (p.64)
• Hazel, Leafy’s Black mistress (p.39)
• Selim, the Lebanese boutique owner who Leafy rents a very basic flat from as accommodation for his mistress, Hazel (p.38)
• Geraldine Jones, friend of Priscilla Fanshawe (p.53)
• Innocence, Fanshawe’s servant who is killed by a freak bolt of lightning
• Isaac, Commission’s doorman and general factotum (p.73) involved in the Innocence fiasco
• Lee Wan, Malay, now a naturalised British citizen and bar buddy of Leafy’s (p.87)
• Femi Robinson, angry little Marxist and representative of the People’s Party of Kinjanja (p.113)
• Chief Mabegun, governor of the state and head of the local branch of the United Party of Kinjanjan People, the party in government (p.113)
• Celia Adekunle, Sam’s sullen wife (p.114)

Leafy overflows with inappropriate thoughts: he’s continually wondering what people look like when they have sex. Or fantasising about a nuclear bomb falling on Nkongsamba and incinerating everyone. When the Deputy High Commissioner’s wife calls, announcing herself as Chloe, Leafy is momentarily at a loss placing her:

The mental lapse came about because Morgan never thought of her as Chloe, and only seldom as Mrs Fanshawe. Usually the kindest epithets were the Fat Bitch or the Old Bag. (p.24)

Or his feelings for his boss:

He found it hard to fix or even identify his feelings about Fanshawe: they wavered between the three poles of nostril-wrinkling contempt, total indifference and temple-throbbing irritation… (p.27)

You can see how the comedy is based on the principle of exorbitance, defined as: ‘excessiveness, a situation when there’s an unreasonable amount of something, or when a person acts outrageously’ – the excessiveness being Leafy’s continual, overdriven anger and irritation at everyone and everything.

• Morgan agreed, thinking: the conniving covert little bastard. (p.32)
• The stupid mad shit, he thought wrathfully (p.67)
• Fine, Morgan thought blackly, well, you can stick your advice up your tight Scottish arse… (p.95)
• What in hell’s name, he asked himself, was the old goat bleating on about? (p.101)
• … thinking that Fanshawe was a stupid, meddling old berk (p.115)
• Shut up you stupid Welsh git, Leafy swore under his breath (p.117)
• That stupid old fool Fanshawe, he railed to himself… (p.143)
• Bloody rude black bastard, Morgan seethed to himself… (p.143)

Mind you, the universal rage this kind of personality vents at everybody is often rooted in anger and disappointment against themselves and Leafy is just as prolific with self-hatred:

• Why did he have to sound so cretinous, he wondered. (p.30)
• Why did Murray bring out the arsehole in him? (p.48)
• It [Murray’s voice] made Morgan feel a fool, cretinous. (p.80)
• He felt a complete fool… (p.94)
• He felt ashamed at his ineptitude, his clumsy inability… He shook his head in despair… He gritted his teeth with shame and embarrassment… (p.117)
• He had been made to look a complete fool (p.144)

According to Freud depression is a kind of anger against the self for failing to live up to the impossibly demanding ideals of the superego set for us by our superegos. Leafy seems a textbook example.

He’d handled everything so badly, misjudged and miscalculated all round. Par for the course, he thought cynically, no point in breaking the pattern. (p.82)

He is either seething with out-of-control rage against everyone else (‘he fumed inwardly’, p.29), or redirecting that rage against himself, triggering inconsolable depression, a leaden moroseness:

• He stared morosely at the dragon-patterned rugs on the Fanshawes’ floor (p.30)
• Morgan walked morosely back to the Commission (p.34)

He is constantly telling himself to calm down and get a grip. In one way the novel is a series of incidents strung on a spectrum between Rage and Calm. It records the hopeless quest for calm by an irredeemably angry man.

Morgan could hardly breathe from the effort he was making to stay calm. (p.149)

Physicality

About half way through the book I realised that what makes Boyd’s antihero stand out in a crowded field of British comic antiheroes is that he not only makes a fool of himself and overflows with frustrated anger, it’s the physicality of his responses, an almost continual heart attack-level of strangulation and collapse:

• He could feel huge sobs of frustration and despair building up in his chest, crushing his lungs against his rib cage, making it increasingly hard to breathe. (p.150)
• Panic fluttered for a moment in his belly like a trapped bird. (p.155)
• The familiar suffocating feeling established itself in Morgan’s chest; it was like having your lungs stuffed with cotton wool. (p.156)
• He felt his head was about to explode (p.159)

Maybe it’s just me but at various moments I, the reader, had sympathetic physical twinges, I felt premonitions of the same physical sensations Morgan experiences, so convincing and compelling does the fever-wracked character become. For example here he is having just read about the symptoms of gonorrhoea:

Morgan closed the book and thought he could actually hear blood draining from his face. He leant against a nearby wall and felt a tremor of blind fear run through his body. (p.168)

In fact it sometimes feels like you’re reading a kind of encyclopedia of stress symptoms, an extraordinarily imaginative and vivid variety of ways of expressing the physical symptoms of stress and rage and frustration.

Doing the wrong thing

Leafy has a talent for doing the wrong thing. In this respect he comes from a long line of comically bumbling English nincompoops. For some reason the figure of gauche young Ian Carmichael in countless 1950s movies comes to mind, but a closer analogy would be hapless Henry Wilt from Tom Sharpe’s series of novels about him, or any number of raging boobies from the comic fiction of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Lesley Thomas, David Lodge or Howard Jacobson.

For example, when he sees a deeply mad derelict standing at a busy road junction, shuffling and dancing, he suddenly feels an overwhelming identification with the man and, on impulse, gives him a pound note … which the madman proceeds to scrunch up and eat (p.18).

Or the time he took Priscilla home to her parent’s house and, noticing a grand gong in the corner of the living room, a relic of Fanshawe’s time in the Far East, impulsively hit it with the padded gong beater while mimicking the grand movie voiceover: ‘J. Arthur Rank presents…’ to be greeted with complete silence from Priscilla’s appalled parents (p.28).

He realises this about himself; he is self aware

Murray – like young Dalmire – was simply a handy scapegoat, a useful objective correlative for his own stupid mistakes, his fervent pursuit of the cock-up, the banal farce he was so industriously trying to turn his life into. (p.16)

No wonder, then, that he needs his Black mistress, Hazel, to shore up what’s left of ‘his tottering ego’ (p.39), despite the strong sense that she’s the one exploiting him. It is entirely characteristic that when he has sex with Hazel, he struggles to keep a ‘flagging erection’ (p.41). He’s pretty sure she left her two illegitimate children back in the village to become a prostitute in the big city. He strongly suspects she’s using the flat he’s renting for her to sleep with other men. But, damn! she arouses him instantly and happily has straightforward, uncomplicated sex. But the reader already senses the potential for humiliation if word gets round the pompous, pukka Commission that he has a paid African mistress.

And so his standard behaviour is muttering threateningly but impotently at everyone in his life, seething inwardly, physically shaken by anger, hatred and mortification.

The novel is cast in three parts:

Part 1 (pages 11 to 83)

It’s one of those comic novels which is packed with incident – from Leafy’s point of view, embarrassing humiliating incidents – but which has certain basic plotlines.

Adekunle blackmail

Most important is that he is being blackmailed by Professor Chief Sam Adekunle, head of the Kinjanjan National Party (KNP). The Chief studied at Harvard Business School and is a smooth operator. He is blackmailing Leafy by threatening to report to all and sundry that he has a Black mistress who was formerly a prostitute. In return, at the end of Part One, Adenkunle reveals that he wants Leafy to cosy up to the starchy Dr Murray and, when the time is right, offer him a huge bribe, because…

Adekunle has bought a plot of land on which the city university is planning to build a massive extension of its campus (a hall and cafeteria, p.230). He aims to sell it to the university for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Murray is chair of the Building Committee who need to sign off on the deal. But the conscientious Murray has rooted around in the civil planning department and discovered that the plot of land right next to Adekunle’s has been scheduled to become the city dump, and what a giant festering, poisonous dump it will become! So – Adekunle wants Leafy to cosy up to Murray and, when the time is right, offer him a whopping £10,000 to suppress his knowledge about the dump and sign off on the land sale.

Getting Priscilla back

The novel opens with the scene in which Dickie Dalmire swankily tells Leafy that he’s engaged to the gorgeous Priscilla, who Leafy used to go out with and who he had sex with on one glorious, never-to-be-forgotten occasion. But this just triggers a determination in Leafy to, in some specified way, get Priscilla back, seduce her away from Dalmire, rub his nose in it – all part of Leafy’s manic determination to get his revenge on the entire world. But you can see how Leafy’s sweaty obsession with Priscilla, and his determination on all occasions to remind her of their one night of passion a) provides a continuous running comic theme and b) promises disaster.

Father Christmas

Christmas is coming and Leafy finds himself bullied into playing Father Christmas for the local kiddies by the not-to-be-denied Chloe Fanshawe, imposing wife of his boss. This plays to the common comic trope of the man overflowing with homicidal rage forced to play nicely-nicely to a bunch of screaming kids and, inevitably, blowing his top.

Royal visit

In this kind of ‘Brits abroad’ fiction there’s often a visit by an official from back in Britain, in which everyone has to be on their best behaviour and which, of course, turns into a disastrous fiasco. Compare and contrast the visit by the Defence Secretary to the Hong Kong army barracks in Lesley Thomas’s Onward Virgin Soldiers (1971) or the Royal visit to the fictional colony of Samolo in Noel Coward’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ (1960).

In this story, it is the visit of the Duchess of Ripon, third cousin twice removed the Queen (p.103). The fact that she’s not that eminent a royal is itself comic bathos, deflating.

Election

And then there is going to be a general election, in which Chief Sam Adekunle, head of the Kinjanjan National Party (KNP), is standing.

Mother-in-law

Chloe Fanshawe, wife of Leafy’s boss, is not technically Leafy’s mother-in-law but is the butt of mother-in-law tropes i.e. Leafy instinctively hates her and she despises him. This animosity is demonstrated in his fascination with her anatomy, and especially her prodigious embonpoint. Finding mature women’s bodily shapes funny is, I imagine, nowadays effectively banned. Not so back in 1981.

Mrs Fanshawe had risen to her feet and was belting her dressing gown tightly about her waist, thereby crudely accentuating the body-forms which bulked beneath the candlewick shroud. Morgan inwardly remarked on the prodigious humps that defined her chest and how, curiously, they wobbled transversely as she marched over to her husband. (p.70)

And description of her ‘huge bosom’ (p.29).

So in part one we are introduced to all the key characters, the diplomats ‘at work’ i.e. bantering in their offices, or pretending to chummy at ‘the club’, Leafy’s beloved Priscilla, his mistress Hazel, Sam Adekunle and the blackmail plan.

Part one ends on a bizarre note with an extended sequence where Leafy is woken up after he’s gone to bed and requested by his boss to come over to their house where their maid, Innocence, has been killed by a freak bolt of lightning in a heavy storm. Fanshawe orders him to sort it out and then goes back to bed (the sanctimonious, middle-class bastard, thinks Leafy). This turns into a nightmare because none of the Black servants or staff will touch the body out of fear of the lightning god, Shango. Not even the Black undertakers will remove the body. Only the family can hire a voodoo priest to perform a ritual to cleanse the body, but that costs up to £60 if you throw in the funeral and entertainment costs. Innocence’s daughter doesn’t have that kind of money.

Then Leafy has a brainwave: Dr Murray and his team and the University Clinic. But when he phones Murray the call goes disastrously wrong: Murray refuses point blank to come out or have any of his team touch the body, since university and Commission rules insist they only treat Commission staff. Leafy has been up all night suffering successive setbacks in this stupid bloody task and finally loses it, effing and blinding at Murray who slams the phone down. At which point Leafy realises he has incredibly pissed off the one man he’s meant to be chumming up to and so has, once again, shot himself in the foot, so his chagrin, rage and self-hatred go off the scale.

He threw back his head and bared his teeth in a silent scream of pent-up anger, frustration and hostility at the universe. (p.81)

Slowly Leafy is overcome by a passionate desire to bribe Murray, to take him down a peg or two, to tarnish his saintly self-image, and so he coldly sets himself on revenge. To the reader, this seems a catastrophically bad conclusion to draw, but with immense comic potential.

Part 2 (pages 87 to 206)

Part 2 opens with a surprise – it jumps back in time to 2 or 3 months earlier, to September of the same year when the Fanshawes arrive back from their summer break with their daughter Priscilla. We see Fanshawe very excited about the upcoming national elections and the face that Adekunle, a big cheese in the Kinjanjan National Party (KNP) happens to live in the same town. The point is it’s an opportunity for Fanshawe to cosy up to the people likely to win the election and influence them towards British interests i.e. an opportunity for some real diplomatic work. Fanshawe hopes this brilliant achievement will earn him a better posting as his career comes to an end.

Fanshawe asks leafy to squire Priscilla

As a side note he explicitly asks Leafy if he could take his daughter Priscilla out, as she is feeling low on the rebound from being jilted by a pukka fiancé.

Leafy meets Dr Murray

We also watch the scene where Leafy first introduces himself to Dr Murray, bullying reception, refusing to see the other (coloured) physicians, trying to pull rank, sweaty and smelling of booze – you can see why the tidy, sober, rule-following Dr Murray would despise him.

Leafy snogs Priscilla

Then excruciatingly funny descriptions of his attempts to seduce the emotionally vulnerable Priscilla, lying that he went to a (minor) public school, lying about his dad’s profession, even saying yah instead of yes, to try and raise himself to her posh social stratum.

Cocktail party and film

Fanshawe rather absurdly names the plan to cosy up to Adekunle Project Kingpin. Leafy organises a cocktail party for local notables and we are introduced to Femi Robinson, angry little Marxist and representative of the People’s Party of Kinjanja, and Chief Mabegun, governor of the state and head of the local branch of the United Party of Kinjanjan People, the party in government. The cocktail party is a fiasco for Leafy who can’t cope with Adekunle’s suave sophistication and ends up looking like an idiot following him round the room. At one point Leafy passes on to him Fanshawe’s offer of first class flights to London and a room at Claridge’s but, to Morgan’s horror, Adekunle merely bursts out laughing at the crassness of this offer, as if it was still the days when the natives could be overawed with the offer of a trip to London (p.142). Even when the film projector gets going showing the new film about the Royal Family, Leafy finds himself still standing blocking everyone’s view, feeling yet again, chagrined with humiliation.

(Incidentally, if this is the famous film about the Royal Family directed by Richard Cawston, it was first shown in 1969. Is that the date of the events described in the novel? That would explain all the Vietnam references. And why, when the Black radical turns up to confront Leafy, he does so wearing a black leather jacket, black glasses and Afro, ‘every inch the black power activist’, p.215.)

Fishing trip

Priscilla is irritated that Morgan ignored her at the cocktail party-film show so to make up he takes her on a fishing trip to the river Olokomeji which is, of course, a fiasco, because Morgan inadvertently catches a huge fish which he has to bash against a rock so many times to kill it that it’s reduced to a pulp and he is covered with blood and scales. At which point he tries to seduce Priscilla, telling her he loves her, and she, very understandably, freezes up and asks him not to. He drives her home, she announces she’s going to stay with an American diplomatic family, the Wagners.

Leafy drives on to the hotel where his Black lover, Hazel, stays but she hasn’t been home. Which is when he decides to instal her in a flat.

Adekunle’s birthday party

Leafy is invited by Adekunle’s bored white wife, Celia, to Adekunle’s birthday party at the Hotel de Executive. He bumps into the German businessman and attaché George Muller who briefs him about Adekunles’s business interests and makes Leafy (and the reader) realise what an ignoramus Leafy is: he knows nothing not only about Adekunle, but about the ethnic, religious and political make-up of the state he’s living in. When Leafy makes what he thinks is a subtle approach he is disconcerted that Adekunle bursts into laughter, and says he’s already been approached by America, France and West Germany. Thoroughly humiliated, he rushes to see Hazel at her seedy hotel, and has sex so vigorously he makes his penis sore. At least he thinks that’s the cause. The reader realises he’s picked up a sexually transmitted infection. The comic potential is that he gives it to someone (Priscilla)?

Murray’s clinic

Only when his servant Friday says he’s stopped washing Morgan’s pants because they are soiled with a nauseating discharge is Morgan horrified into making an emergency appointment with Dr Murray, a classic example of the anxious-man-having-penis-examined trope.

Club party

The horribly provincial club dance night with dreadful jazz or loud rock music. Morgan takes Priscilla who is duly disappointed. But in the car there and on the dancefloor she had been surprisingly kissable and biddable. Morgan thinks tonight is the night he’s going to bed her. Until he bumps into Dr Murray in the corridor to the lavatories, who informs him, in a confidential whisper, that he has gonorrhoea. It is a very funny moment when, a few minutes later, Priscilla returns from her trip to the loo and remarks that Morgan is looking very red. Does he feel alright?

Humiliation with Priscilla

There follows an agonisingly embarrassing scene in which drunk Priscilla insists on being taken back to Leafy’s flat, kisses, grabs him, starts stripping off in the darkened living room, drunkenly preparing for an orgy, while Leafy comes up with a flurry of implausible excuses before he’s driven to leap up and turn the main lights on. At which point, Priscilla, seeing her state, stalks off to the bathroom to get dressed then insists on being driven home in silence. When Leafy tries to make excuses she delivers a speech describing him as a pitiful worm. Driving home, then in bed alone, his chagrin and frustration knows no bounds.

More Murray

Opens with a very funny scene of Leafy consulting a medical encyclopedia in the university library and nearly fainting as he reads about the horrifying complications of gonorrhoea. Then onto a formal consultation with Murray who confirms the diagnosis but says all it requires will be two injections with penicillin and total abstinence from sex and alcohol for four weeks. And inform all your sexual partners. When he tells his Black mistress, she admits to having three other part-time lovers.

Dickie Dalmire arrives

Leafy is at the airport to greet the ‘new man’ sent out to the Commission, and take him for lunch at the Fanshawes’ (his new boss) where, Leafy is chagrined, as usual, to see Dalmire’s pukka public school confidence putting him instantly at home with Arthur, Chloe and Priscilla in a way grammar school, suburban Leafy never achieved in three years.

Adekunle stuns Fanshawe by accepting the offer of a visit to Britain but demanding a) two weeks at Claridge’s b) an official reception at the airport c) open-ended return tickets for two. Fanshawe is dumbfounded at the reversal of the power dynamic, with the Black man now setting the terms. Trouble is more and more oil deposits are being discovered in the country and HM govt want the new Kinjanja govt to give Britain preferential treatment. Adekunle’s party aren’t a dead cert to win the upcoming election, but are the favourites.

Celia

Morgan gets accustomed to meeting Celia Adekunle almost every morning at ‘the club’ for swimming and sunbathing. She’s hard and cynical and small and bony, not at all his type, yet they have an instant rapport. She admits hers is an empty token marriage. She’d run away if she could.

Hazel’s flat

Leafy hires the seedy shabby flat where we find Hazel ensconced in part one.

Celia

Morgan and Celia are now driving to rendezvous in the country and having lovely carefree sex. They stop for a drink at a bar on the way back into town and she persuades him to come back to the house – her husband’s away and she dismisses the servant and sex in a proper bed takes on a whole new dimension.

Caught

Outside Celia’s house, fumbling for his car keys, Leafy is terrified to be buttonholed by Adekunle who proceeds to tell him he knows all about his affair with his wife, and about his Black woman in town (Hazel). Would he like his boss to find out about this, how Morgan has screwed up Fanshawe’s precious Kingpin project? No. Therefore Leafy is going to do everything Adekunle tells him to, right? Fearing he may pass out with terror or throw up, Leafy agrees and is amazed when the upshot of all this terrifying is imply that…Adekunle wants Leafy to become friends with Dr Murray. Oh and end the affair with his wife, without letting her know that Adekunle knows about it.

The engagement

The short scene ending part two turns out to lead directly into the opening of part one. It’s where Dalmire pops into the office of a Leafy who has turned into a depressed recluse, drinking heavily to compensate for the abrupt ending of the affair with Celia, and announces that he’s just got engaged to Priscilla.

This is very clever. The opening of the book put me off a bit because I didn’t understand what was going on. But anyone who persists this far, to page 204, now has an infinitely deeper grasp of the events which lay behind Leafy’s desperate, raging emotions, the way the entire universe is conspiring to frustrate his every wish and desire.

In fact it would be tempting to reread all of part one in the light of the extensive and thorough backgrounding part two gives you, to read it a second time with a much deeper understanding of all its resonances and meanings.

Part 3 (pages 209 to 312)

Part 3 opens exactly where part 1 ended, with Leafy weeping tears of frustration at the refusal of all the Black servants or public services to remove the body of Innocence, struck dead by lightning. In other words, part 2 might at one stage originally been the opening and first hundred pages of the novel but Boyd or someone had the bright idea of lifting and shifting it completely to become part 2, changing what was originally the next section, part 2, into part 2. So the narrative starts in media res (‘in the middle of things’) as the critics of ancient Greece and Rome recommended. The effect is to cleverly create all kinds of unexpected resonances and explanations. Very artful, very clever.

Leafy’s ignorance

Alongside Leafy’s overactive sex drive, his alcoholism and his shambling ineptitude goes a stunning ignorance of almost every aspect of the country he’s working in and the people he’s supposed to be studying. So, for example, he knew nothing about Adekunle’s business interests until the German, Georg Muller, told him, and various other characters tell him that this or that piece of information is ‘common knowledge’, all of which come as complete news to dim Leafy.

I suddenly realised how important this is when the Marxist leader Femi Robinson comes to see him to protest about newspaper photos of Adekunle being greeted by Foreign Office officials in London. He’s protesting because these photos give the impression that London is supporting Adekunle’s party, the KNP, in the soon-to-be-held elections. But it’s not just that which is a problem. The real issue is that this support from the old imperial power will discredit the KNP in the eyes of the army who are already disgusted with the corruption of the ruling party. There have already been small army mutinies. The risk is that the army will step in and stage a coup. Leafy asks, ‘Are you sure?’ Robinson replies: ‘Everybody knows it,’ (p.217) except, of course, dim Leafy (and, to be fair, his equally dithering boss, Fanshawe).

In this final act, Leafy’s universal ignorance has serious consequences.

Christmas fitting

To Leafy’s surprise, Mrs Fanshawe takes him upstairs to the attic but it turns out to be to try on a boilersuit she’s dyed red as part of the Father Christmas outfit she’s making up for him. She briskly tells him to strip down to his undies to try it on but when he hands it back turns a funny colour, makes excuses and rushes off. Odd, thinks Leafy, till he looks down and sees his penis has flopped out of the slit in his boxer shorts. For some reason this sexual embarrassment reminds me of the endless humiliations suffered by the Ben Miller character in the TV series ‘The Worst Week of my Life’.

It’s now the day before Christmas Eve and Leafy has two massive problems. Adekunle simply won’t accept that Leafy’s fallen out with Murray and insists, if he doesn’t want his career ruined, that he offer him the bribe. And the body of Innocence is still lying on a bench in the servants’ quarters of the Commission steadily decomposing because no Africans will touch it till the juju priest has performed his ceremony, with his boss Fanshawe becoming apoplectic that it be removed before the bloody Duchess of Ripon arrives for her two-day visit the next day.

So Leafy bullies his servant Friday into joining him at 3am to secretly carry the rotting putrid corpse to his car. Half way through a white ghost appears in the nearby trees but an unimpressed Leafy rugby tackles him only to discover he’s the poet sent by the British Council, one Greg Bilbow from Yorkshire. Leafy tells him to wait, goes back and he and Friday drag the corpse the last few yards to his car and heave it into the boot. Then he drives Friday back to his house and Bilbow back to his (Leafy’s) apartment where he’s promised to put him up. It has just turned Christmas Day.

Tribulations

He is astonished to get a call from a livid Fanshawe. Turns out when the Commission’s staff found the body of Innocence gone, they went on strike. Obviously this is a disaster what with the Duchess about to arrive, let alone the following day when there’s a massive party scheduled for 200 local dignitaries. Leafy must smuggle Innocence’s rotting body back to where it was.

He’s barely coping with this information before he has to dress up as Father Christmas and dole out presents to the kiddies at the Commission’s Christmas party. The Duchess has arrived and watches him entertain the kiddywinks.

Returning Innocence

After surviving the Father Christmas ordeal, Leafy spends the rest of the evening getting completely pissed at the Commission bar, dressed as Santa, the butt of many jokes. It’s here that a way of solving the Innocence problem comes to him. So it is that, sometime after midnight, utterly hammered, Leafy drives round to the staff accommodation, pours petrol all over the rubbish dump, lights it with a great whoomph of flame in his own face, then runs back to the car. As all the servants wake and run to tackle the fire and so are distracted, Leafy then drives further round the accommodation block, opens the boot, yanks the rotting corpse of Innocence back to more or less where he found it, leaps back into the car and drives round the perimeter road back to the Commission.

The duchess in the bathroom

He imagines the bathroom will be empty at this time of night so slips inside with a view to cleaning up. He is stunned when he sees his own reflection in the mirror, his face blackened with the flames, one eyebrow burned off, his face lined with the white tracks of his tears. But not as stunned as when he hears footsteps coming up the hallway and, to cut a long story short, it turns out that he’s using the bathroom assigned to the Duchess of Ripon. Leafy hurriedly hides in the shower but can’t help overhearing as the Duchess strips off, has a hearty dump, then whisks the shower curtain back to reveal…a mad burned Santa! Stunned into immobility, the Duchess watches as Bad Santa climbs out of the bath, opens the bathroom window and climbs out. Laughing manically, he scampers across the grass to his car, drives back to the apartment where the Yorkshire poet takes the mickey out of his ridiculous appearance, washes his burned face and collapses into bed.

The golf tournament

The Commission are hosting a golf tournament. Leafy had asked Adekunle to work behind the scenes and get him paired with Murray so he can make his move. But, to his dismay, as they stroll and chat round the course, Leafy discovers that he likes Murray.

Finally he nerves himself to make his pitch and offers Murray the £10,000 bribe. Leafy handles it in a characteristically cack-handed way, and ends up telling Murray everything about Adekunle, that he owns the land the new buildings would be built on etc and how he’s been blackmailed into making the bribe. Murray says no to the bribe and that he must report it. Leafy reaches the end of his tether and physically collapses and passes out.

When he comes round, Murray is concerned and says OK he won’t report him, but the answer is still no. He’s recommending the Committee reject the application simply because he doesn’t want corrupt operators like Adekunle to win. Leafy gives up. It’s all over. Adekunle will tell Fanshawe about his shame, his career will be over, he might as well book his flight back to London now.

Hazel’s

Once he can walk, Leafy drives to Hazel’s and holes up there for days, including during the important general election. He periodically phones his apartment where the affable Yorkshire poet tells him Adekunle has been trying to contact him for days. Eventually Adekunle tracks him down to Hazel’s and tells him he has changed his mind and doesn’t want him to offer Murray the bribe after all! What!?

Innocence solution

Convinced he’s going to be sacked, in a new mood of fatalistic resignation, Leafy tells the servants protecting Innocence’s now-restored corpse that he’ll pay for the priest and the funeral. The price goes up to £80 but Leafy doesn’t begrudge it. What the hell. His career is shot. His time here is over.

Election victory

When Adekunle rang Leafy he sounded happy and generous because the votes are in and his party, the KNP, has won a majority. They will be the new government. Adekunle invites Leafy to the victory party. As he leaves for it, his man Friday tells him to avoid the town tomorrow as ‘the soldiers will come’. He repeats the motif: ‘Everybody knows’. Everybody except Leafy, that is.

Adekunle’s victory party

Adekunle explains that he was constantly phoning Leafy in order to tell him not to offer Murray the bribe. Turns out that Adekunle has made a contact within the planning department and has made sure that, even if Murray signs off a negative report, it will be ‘lost’ by his (Adekunle’s) contact and never registered. So all the heartaching and the humiliation of offering Murray the bribe was for nothing. Leafy is gutted.

Celia

Leafy drinks himself silly all evening, eventually staggering upstairs to the loo to throw up. When he’s quite finished, he grabs a random toothbrush to clean his teeth. He’s barely staggered out onto the landing before Celia pounces and drags him into a spare bedroom. Here it becomes clear that she’s decided to leave Adekunle but needs him to get her a British visa. In a flash Leafy realises she’s been using him, the entire affair was to seduce him into providing the visa. One more delusion, one more bitter let-down. He is heartbroken and just walks away, leaving Celia still crying for his help.

The siege

But something massive is about to happen, a massively violent event which forms the climax of the book.

On his way to Adekunle’s house Leafy had seen the wizened old Marxist Femi Robinson clutching a load of placards on his way to a student sit-in and protest at the university administration buildings. With typical lack of tact and awareness Leafy had mentioned that he and Fanshawe and other officials would all be at Adekunle’s party which was by way of being a victory party. Well, we know that Robinson considered all the press photos in the papers of Adekunle being greeted by top officials on his recent trip to London had been a conscious attempt by Britain to influence the election which, in the event, Adekunle and his KNP had won.

Now, completely unexpectedly, Robinson brings a contingent of protesting students from the main building over to Adekunle’s grand home. Adekunle had invited important dignitaries, the Kinjanjan press and had planned to make a grand victory speech. Instead he finds his house surrounded by furious students throwing stones and bricks and, most incongruous of all, chanting ‘FAN-SHAWE FAN-SHAWE.’ This is because Leafy had incautiously told Robinson that Fanshawe was the brains behind Adekunle’s visit to London, and that Fanshawe would be at Adekunle’s party – and also because it’s easier to chant than Robinson’s long doctrinaire slogans (which he nonetheless valiantly yells through a loudhailer).

Luckily, Adekunle’s place is protected by a tough security fence, but the protesters are still managing to lob bricks and stones with accuracy through the windows and the guests are taking cover behind makeshift barricades of furniture. In this highly stressed situation, both Fanshawe and Adekunle turn to Leafy to do something and, surprisingly, Leafy comes up with a plan! This is to pretend to be Fanshawe and make an escape to distract the protesters.

So he and Fanshawe swaps clothes, the idea being he’ll run for the Commission’s distinctive official car dressed as Fanshawe, get Adekunle’s (reluctant) security people to open the front gate as he drives through it at top speed and so distract them. At which point tubby old Chloe Fanshawe, the Deputy Commissioner’s wife volunteers to come with him. As soon as she does that I knew they were going to have sex.

Freud somewhere says the traditional dislike between son and mother-in-law is actually a taboo designed to prevent its opposite, which is inappropriate sexual attraction between these roles. This had been palpable ever since we first met her and Leafy combined a detailed description of her physique with wonder at the tension and dislike between them.

The escape

It all goes to plan. Leafy-dressed-as-Fanshawe makes a break through the hail of stone for the car, hand in hand with the distinctive, party-dress-wearing and very plump Mrs Fanshawe. they jump in, drive at the gates which Adekunle’s security men open at the last minute, race through as protesters throw themselves out the way, then charge after them still throwing stones. There’s a hairy moment when the car careers into a shallow ditch and won’t move as the protesters come charging at them but this just makes the distraction tactic more successful, as the back wheels finally get traction and it roars free.

The riot police

But Leafy and Chloe’s night is far from finished because the authorities have called in the riot police to deal with the student protests and things have turned really nasty. The admin block of the university looks like a warzone with windows shattered, groups of burning cars, and row upon row of helmeted, shielded riot police approaching the building and firing rifles at the students throwing bricks, stones and office equipment at them from the windows, the whole scene drenched in stifling teargas. All this is blocking the main road out of the campus. Leafy and Chloe can get no further in the car and have gotten out to try and sneak round the warzone on foot.

A Murray moment

On the way there, still in the car, leafy had spotted a solitary figure standing by the road and screeched to a halt. It’s Dr Murray. He gives more detail about the extent of the rioting. Leafy offers him a lift. Murray says no, he’s waiting for the university ambulance to come pick him up then will be treating the injured. Leafy lingers unnecessarily because he wants, somehow, to express the complicated feelings he’s come to have for Murray, who’s gone from figure of unmitigated hatred to someone who was kind to him (when he fainted on the golf course) and whose integrity he’s come to respect. The best he can do is warn him that Adekunle has dropped the bribe offer because he has a contact in the building office who will ‘lose’ Murray’s report, so Leafy warns him to make copies and distribute them widely. Murray thanks him, there’s an awkward pause, then our man jumps back in the car and heads off with Mrs F.

(It’s worth remembering that Boyd’s own father was Scottish and served as head of the health clinic at the University College of the Gold Coast. Is this a portrait of his father, strict, stern and worthy of respect? A filial compliment?)

Escape from the campus

Long story short, Leafy and Chloe manage to escape the campus but not before having a very hairy moment when they set off running across open ground and a detachment of riot police spot them and chase them, firing their guns at them, Leafy hearing the bullets whining past his head. I thought at this point that maybe Chloe would be shot and injured, certainly this all feels too serious for them just to get away. It’s not funny any more.

But they do get away, just, running through the maze of back alleys and gardens of the university’s residential quarter until the police have obviously given up chasing. Exhausted, filthy, bleeding from wounds caused by stones and thorny bushes, they find the perimeter fence and climb it, emerging on a normal road not far from a normal cheap bar. Here Leafy offers the owner £10 if he’ll drive them out of there.

Empty Commission

When the taxi driver brings them to the Commission, Leafy and Chloe find it locked up but a note from Fanshawe saying a) the guests escaped from Adekunle’s b) Fanshawe has accompanied the daughter, Priscilla, and Dalmire into town, to the airport, where the young couple had been planning to go on holiday anyway, c) that Denzil Jones has offered Chloe accommodation for the night.

At Leafy’s

Chloe asks if she can come back to Leafy’s house to clean up so he gets the waiting taxi driver to take them there, and pays him his £10. She has a bath, he pours himself a stiff (i.e big) whisky, she emerges in a big towel and sets about darning her ruined dress so as to be as respectable as possible when she goes to stay with Jones except that…she now tells him huskily…she doesn’t want to go to the Jones house. She wants to spend the night here. Aha. As I predicted.

Remember that moment when she was measuring him up for his Father Christmas suit and, unintentionally, his limp penis flopped out of his boxer shorts not very far from her face and she flusteredly looked out the window, made an excuse and left. Well, it turns out she’s been thinking about Leafy’s penis – ‘a lot’ (p.309).

Leafy for his part feels himself strangely attracted to his one-time putative mother-in-law (paging Dr Freud), has a thorough shower, then they are in bed naked together, she stroking his growing arousal, he nuzzling her huge breasts etc, when…the phone rings.

Death of Dr Murray

It’s Inspector Gbeho from Nkongsamba police headquarters. He is duty bound to report the death of any Brits to the Commission and can’t get hold of his boss, Fanshawe (who we know is at the airport). Dr Murray is dead. He was in an ambulance carrying students to the clinic and it skidded on the wet road and, well, he was killed in the crash. Just like that.

The good man

Leafy thanks the inspector, puts the phone down and (rather like the reader) is overcome with a whirligig of images and emotions. Above all the sense of futility. Murray was a genuinely good man, probably the only good man in the story – efficient, professional and with clear moral values – unlike any of the bumbling British diplomats, let alone an out-and-out crook like Adekunle. Naked, enormous Chloe Fanshawe is calling him from the bed where she wants Leafy to ‘make their night complete’. Leafy ponders what Dr Murray would make of him bedding his boss’s wife. Wouldn’t have approved, would he?

The news of Murray’s death evaporates Leafy’s erection and arousal. He tiredly pads down the hall to the bedroom and starts to make his apologies. ‘Listen Chloe, I’ve been thinking…’ This is mostly comic, but also genuinely sad and poignant.

The difference between farce and comedy is that the former pushes beyond the limits of plausibility into the absurd, delighting in far-fetched coincidences and hair’s-breadth escapes for their own sake, the more wildly improbable the better. Farce revels in deliberately contrived plots, plots which emphasise their own structures, playing with repetition, inversion, variations.

Thus Leafy’s last-minute change of heart about sleeping with Chloe Fanshawe makes a neat parallel with the buttock-clenchingly embarrassing scene where he was forced to refuse to have sex with her daughter, Priscilla. The turn of events is humorous in its own right but also gives the reader a pleasing sense of structure and contrivance. Boyd is a technically adept author.

The coup

And while Leafy is miserably apologising to Chloe, the perspective of the narrative pulls back to pan across the campus, revealing the burned-out cars and trashed offices, and on into the city itself as the army mounts the coup which everyone, certainly all the ordinary locals, knew about well in advance, everyone except Britain’s blinkered, drunk, snobbish, self-obsessed diplomats, experts in disaster and humiliation, utter fools when it comes to understanding the country they’re posted to.

‘Good man’

The phrase ‘good man’, like the main theme in a piece of classical music, is stated right at the start, in fact make up the novel’s first two words, as spoken by lucky Dalmire announcing his engagement to Priscilla to a mortified Leafy, who pretends to take it on the chin but inside is anything but a ‘good man’, seething with rage and hatred of Dalmire.

In other words, the phrase is used ironically right from the start, Dalmire being too obtuse to realise that Leafy, at that moment, wants to kill him and blow up the entire town i.e. he is quite possibly the opposite of a good man, he is a very bad man.

Thereafter the phrase is repeated, slowly accumulating resonances and layers of irony, not least because all the people who use the expression ‘good man’ wouldn’t actually recognise a good man if he bit them on the bottom.

On page 32 Leafy’s boss, Fanshawe, fatuously calls Leafy ‘a good man’ for reluctantly acquiescing to dress up as Father Christmas, something Leafy a) hates having to do b) is only doing because it will get him closer to the superb breasts of Fanshawe’s daughter, so the phrase implicates both the sayer (obtuse, conventionally minded Fanshawe) and the addressee (lustful seething Leafy).

On page 51, Leafy is at the bar with Dalmire and Jones who is very drunk and drunkenly calls Leafy ‘a bloody good man’, slapping him hard on the back, and Leafy, to his credit, fumes at how much he hates this ‘ghastly rugger-club expression’ (p.51).

On page 89 Leafy gets drunk in a bar with the disreputable, seedy Lee Wan, a Malayan who’s secured British citizenship and uses all manner of pukka phrases to burnish his Britishness. When Lee Wan bursts out laughing at an off-colour joke Leafy makes about importing condoms, Leafy drunkenly considers him ‘a good man to have around’. Again, irony, because Lee is a creepy sycophant.

On page 192 Fanshawe calls Leafy a ‘good man’ in an unstated recognition that Leafy has been schmoozing up to, maybe even having an affair with, Adekunle’s wife Celia. No-one acknowledges it, maybe Fanshawe doesn’t really appreciate it, but that’s the point. Don’t ask questions. Leave things unsaid. Gloss over difficult realities. The English way. Leafy is, in fact, being praised for being a sneak.

As I’ve explained, part two in fact gives the 3-month backstory leading up to the opening scene of the book, which opens with Dalmire calling Leafy a ‘good man’ for accepting the news about his and Priscilla’s engagement so calmly (p.206). Having heard the full backstory we now realise that Leafy is very far indeed from being a good man in at least two senses:

a) we’ve seen what an out-of-control drunk he is, how he’s set his Black mistress up in a love nest, contracted gonorrhoea from her and came within an ace of passing it on to Dalmire’s fiancée, Priscilla;

b) far from accepting the news with equanimity as Dalmire thinks, displaying the obtuseness typical of all the characters, internally Leafy is seething with homicidal rage

So it’s another example of the complete failure of the English characters to understand the first thing about what’s going on or achieve even the simplest communication.

At the climax of the novel, when Adekunle’s luxury compound is under attack from the protesting students, useless old Denzil Jones calls Leafy ‘a good man’ for bravely volunteering to impersonate Fanshawe to draw off the protesters ( p.297).

This is a more equivocal example because, although Jones is trapped in the machine of his own predictable behaviour (he slaps Leafy on the back exactly as he did all the way back on page 51) Leafy has, in fact, and to the reader’s surprise, actually volunteered to do quite a heroic thing to save other people. It’s effective and it is heroic. For once, maybe for the first time in his life, he isn’t secretly motivated by sex or drink or promotion. It is as if he is struggling to emerge from the chrysalis of his terrible personality and, for once in his life, do the right thing.

Looking back over the whole narrative, it feels as if Dr Murray’s influence is working, fermenting a new Leafy from the shambles of the old. Everyone else remains stuck in their fixed attitudes and characters, but this, the final use of the phrase in the book, indicates that change is possible.

Four conclusions:

1. I’ve shown how the phrase ‘good man’, right from the start of the novel, more often than not has connotations diametrically opposite to its literal meaning i.e. is used to describe all kinds of dodgy characters (Lee Wan, p.89) or is applied by the English characters to each other in the deepest ignorance or bad faith, glossing over characters’ bad behaviour, or concealing raw hatred for the person talking, or is motivated by the crudest motives.

2. All of which made me come to realise how the phrase ‘good man’ is like a sticking plaster designed to cover over things that would rather not be discussed or made explicit. The British stiff upper lip is related to a cultural insistence not to delve too deep below the surface, an attitude which prefers to paper over unpleasantness with stock public school phrases.

3. The thoughtless bandying about by the English of this clubroom phrase is directly linked to their wider obtuseness and ignorance of what’s going on right under their noses. The English diplomats are depicted as a snobbish shower of incompetents, meddling with forces way beyond their comprehension, but bolstering each other’s morale with this kind of self-congratulatory clubroom catchphrase.

4. Only at the very end of the novel (presumably as intended) did I realise that there is, in fact, only one good man in the book and it is Dr Murray. He is principled and professional in a way none of the other men in the book are. It is symptomatic of Leafy’s degraded condition that he develops such a pathological hatred for a man who is simply following the rules and regulations and then, when offered an enormous bribe, briskly turns it down and insists on doing what he regards as the right thing. This itself has two sub-aspects:

a) Murray isn’t English, he is Scottish. There is a stark distinction between the bumbling incompetent English Commission staff (pompous Fanshawe, out-of-control Leafy, insufferably successful Dalmire) and Murray, who comes from a completely different tradition, of stern Scottish professionalism and moral fibre.

b) From this point of view, taking Murray as the central figure in the book and removing for a moment all the comedy and farce, the narrative could be read as Morgan Leafy’s moral education by Dr Murray, Leafy’s slow, chaotic coming-to-realise that Murray represents an alternative way of being, selfless and noble and professional. Murray is clearly intended to be the Good Man of the title.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, seeing as how Boyd’s own father was a Scottish head of medicine in a West African university, this amounts to quite a tribute from a son to a father, quite a moving gesture of filial loyalty.

Objectifying women

1981. Long time ago, wasn’t it? And most of the book probably written well before then, getting on for 50 years ago. Its age shows, maybe, in some of the disrespectful language used about the Africans (I doubt if it’s nowadays acceptable to call older Black women ‘mammies’). And also in the underlying assumption that only white people are important enough to be treated in detail while most of the Black characters are poverty-stricken, lazy, useless and inarticulate. That’s bad enough.

But I think the main problem a young modern reader would have with this novel is the objectification of women. Boyd has Leafy itemise the appearance of all the women in his life (Hazel, Chloe and Priscilla Fanshawe, Celia Adekunle) in minute, unforgiving detail. The repeated references to Chloe Fanshawe’s huge bosoms is the stuff of traditional mother-in-law jokes but the description of her white blue-veined legs or ‘the large turquoise globes of her buttocks’ (p.223) less so. Leafy pays close attention to, and describes in detail, all women’s breasts.

In a sort of exception, the repeated descriptions of Leafy’s African mistress, skinny, brown Celia Adekunle, with a wattle of loose tummy skin from her two children and her appendectomy scar, this came over to me as surprisingly tender and accepting. But, stepping back a bit, even this is still part of the minute scrutiny of women’s bodies which, I think, would offend the modern female reader.

Boyd’s prose style

Boyd’s prose is extremely smooth and effective, clear and sensible and expressive. I came to ‘A Good Man’ from reading several novels by Giles Foden who wields a complicated mosaic of registers and tones, whose prose is characterised by unwieldy sentences, odd phraseology, clunky positioning of prepositions – numerous quirks and oddities which continually draw attention to themselves.

Absolutely nothing like that with Boyd: his prose is clear, modern, flowing, albeit put in the service of describing a kind of comic psychopath. But you rarely if ever notice Boyd’s prose, just register the comic extremity of Leafy’s volcanic eruptions of rage and frustration, panic and horror. A Good Man in Africa is a well-constructed, clever and very, very funny book.

Credit

A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1981. References are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

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