Fiction
Rude farceur
A . N. Wilson
A Good Man in Africa William Boyd (Hamish Hamilton pp. 264, f6:95) Having almost no sense of humour, I have never seen what was wrong with the Griffith-Jones criterion for fiction established during the Lady Chatterley Trial: 'Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servants to read?' If the answer to the question is `no' it nearly always turns out to be a bad book on some other grounds, or at least to contain bad passages.
It is a particularly useful test of comic literature, almost no book being really funny which can not be read aloud in mixed company. Where the obsolete practice still survives of ladies withdrawing from the table after dinner, the conversational level always plummets; not because it gets smuttier, but because the men stop making the least effort to be interesting. The same applies to comic novels, which explains why nearly all the best comic writers are women; male writers with comic genius being almost invariably, for authorial purposes, as sexless as P.G. Wodehouse.
Two exceptions to my rule would be Tom Sharpe and Kingsley Amis, both of them uncompromisingly masculine, whose books have almost everyone in fits but who have never provoked even the flicker of a smile on my lips; which is what I mean about having no sense of humour. If anyone else feels as I do, it was foolish of William Boyd's publishers to warn us in the blurb that his 'brilliantly funny first novel . . . evokes memories of Kingsley Amis and Tom Sharpe', It led one to expect a sort of barrack-room, or even changing-room, humour designed to exclude at least half the human race.
It is true that A Good Man in Africa has something of this aggressively coarse quality. 'The acid smell of sweat billows noxiously from the armpits' of the hero and, as it were, from the armpits of the author. So when Morgan Leafy, the accident-prone giver-off of these sweaty billows, thinks he is getting V.D., wives and servants of the reader will have to bury their noses in their embroidery while he examines his member. 'For a minute he thought it might have been a vengeful bite from a lavatorial insect he had disturbed — and as he zipped himself up he put it down to the combined effects of latex rubber, and prolonged friction on what Was — let's face it — a fairly sensitive organ'.
The redundant 'let's face it' is an indication of what I am talking about. In his self-conscious absorption in penises, or rather one penis (it makes an appearance in almost every chapter, always so called) the author appears to have forgotten how to write. Compare it with the hilarious crispness with which he writes of another man's knees: 'Morgan detested the sight of his fat little Welsh knees peeking out between the hem of his shorts and the top of his socks like two bald, wrinkled babies' heads'. We can all appreciate that. The passages in which Morgan Leafy solitarily examines his penis could not possibly be thought funny nor, except for narcissistic or homosexual male readers, remotely interesting.
Who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling, if it did not mar ,a most elegantly constructed and well-written farce about modern Africa?
Morgan Leafy is the disgruntled secondin-command at the British High Commission in the provincial capital of a West African country called Kinjanja. As the blurb implies, his relationship with the Deputy High Commissioner, Fanshawe, mirrors Lucky Jim's attitude to Professor Welch; and Leafy has all the pugnacity of an early Amis hero; a weak head for drink; a belligerent consciousness of being lower middle-class; a surprising attractiveness to women; a figure constitutionally designed by his author to put his foot in it wherever he treads ,and yet emerge triumphant. William Boyd's control of a fairly complicated plot reveals him as a most accomplished farceur, and he puts Morgan through his paces with all the assurance of a circus trainer making a poodle jump through hoops. So we witness Morgan almost winning the heart of Priscilla, Fanshawe's daughter, and losing her to the odious public-schoolman Dalmire. But he manages, by a series of extraordinary accidents, to keep an African mistress called Hazel (from whom he catches the V.D.) while enjoying the favours of Celia Adekunle, European wife of a pro-Britisb African political leader; and finally, With wonderful disregard for the probable, to seduce Fanshawe's wife.
This conquest occurs at the end of the book after he has run a rather Torn Sharpe-style obstacle race; first trying to dispose of a rotting corpse before a Royal Visit (that of the 'Duchess of Ripon'); then coming face to face with the naked Duchess in her private bathroom, having 'heard her straining grunts, the farts, the splashes on the W.C.' before she draws aside the plastic shower curtain to reveal him dressed as Father Christmas, with his eye-brows singed (from trying to incinerate the corpse with a can of petrol). All splendid rollicking stuff. . . but not suitable for your wife, or the servants' Library.
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