ABSTRACT
William Boyd's first novel seemed to suggest that he would be a writer to follow in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. The anti-hero of A Good Man in Africa, Morgan Leafy, is the first secretary of the British Deputy Commission in the imaginary West African country of Kinjanja. Boyd is a brilliant comic writer with an ability to employ every device from broad pratfall comedy to dry irony. Yet he clearly felt, from the beginning of his career, that the tag 'comic writer' would have imposed unacceptable restrictions on him. William Boyd was born in Ghana, where his father was a doctor, and spent his early childhood there and in Nigeria. The parallels Boyd wants us to draw between the behaviours of the two primate species—chimp and Homo sapiens—are clear enough but the strength of the story lies in the character of Hope and her determination to examine the reality and implications of her experiences.
