An Ice Cream War

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982 0241108683. First edition. First printing. Hardback. No annotations or inscriptions. Mylar-protected DW is NOT price-clipped. Author's difficult to find third book. 370 pp. 14 cms. by 22 cms. Ex-university library with usual stamps. There is a (water?) stain down the join of the pages 20 and 21. Otherwise VG/VG in unclipped DW. The novel evokes suggestions of the early Evelyn Waugh as a critic of The New York Times wrote at its time of publication. An Ice-Cream War is William Boyd's sparkling debut novel on the grimly comic side of conflict,. What do you think would happen if I shot an elephant in the balls?' 'I think it would hurt a great deal.' Millions die on the Western Front but in East Africa a quite different war is being waged - one with little point and which is so ignored that it will carry on after the Armistice because no one bothers to tell both sides to stop. As the conflict sweeps up natives and colonials, so those left at home and those fighting abroad find themselves unable to escape the tide of history bearing down on them.The novel could be considered a satire on the ineptitude of authority in wartime. A recurring character, District Officer Wheech-Browning, spreads chaos wherever he goes, such that Smith observes that every time he goes somewhere with Wheech-Browning, someone in their company meets an unfortunate death' Wikipedia. "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.' .