Volume 30, Number 9 · June 2, 1983
Closing Time
By Robert Towers
An Ice-Cream War
by William Boyd
Morrow, 408 pp., $17.95
The London Embassy
by Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 248 pp., $13.95
I can imagine an instructive and entertaining essay—written by someone combining the attributes of critic, cultural anthropologist, and antiquarian—on the differing appeals of India and Africa to the British literary imagination. Both, of course, have functioned not only as challenges to explore what seems most alien to the Anglo-Saxon temperament but also as mirrors in which the explorers or invaders have been reflected in some very antic postures. If the Sub-continent has inspired what is still the greatest of such works, A Passage to India, the Dark Continent has undoubtedly attracted the greater number of good writers, a list that includes Waugh, Greene, Joyce Cary, and such partially assimilated non-Britons as Conrad, Naipaul, and Paul Theroux. The latest aspirant to this company is a young Englishman, William Boyd, who was born in Ghana and now teaches at Oxford.
Review, 2470 words
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