A Good Man in Africa

Infobox Book
author= William Boyd
name= A Good Man in Africa
isbn= ISBN 1400030021
release_date= 1981
publisher= Vintage

"A Good Man in Africa" (1981) is William Boyd's first novel. It is a dark comedy about a drunken diplomat who is being blackmailed by a local politician whilst the country slowly falls into chaos. The novel was written in only three months after Boyd procured a publishing deal from Hamish Hamilton, having implied that the book was almost finished when, in fact, it hadn't been started. He had written two novels before this but they had not been published

Plot Summary

In the figure of Morgan Leafy, a hapless British diplomat struggling to master the complexities of his posting to a corrupt west African country (the fictional Kinjanja), Boyd echoes the post-war formula of Angry Young Men. His bumbling, gauche, but ultimately sympathetic protagonist, Morgan Leafy pursues his love interest through a series of career crises and ham-fisted sexual encounters, 'an aristocrat of pain and frustration, a prince of anguish and embarrassment', until he eventually regains his girl, and his self-respect, against all the odds of his situation.

Boyd’s first novel also hints at his sensitivity to Africa as a continent bedeviled by poverty, exploitation and misguided foreign interference. His portrait no doubt builds on his own childhood experiences in Ghana, something he discusses in the autobiographical essay included in "Protobiography" (1998). Though perpetually self-absorbed, Leafy nonetheless registers the misery and decrepitude of his surroundings in the overpopulated capital of Nkongsamba: "Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from the air it resembled nothing so much as a giant pool of vomit on somebody’s expansive unmown lawn."

While the plot of "A Good Man" is driven by a comedy of diplomatic manners, the novel also conveys the heat, sweat, and endless frustrations of a crumbling post-imperial system, with the chaos of a continent throwing into relief a legacy of British incompetence. [cite web |url= http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth17 |author= Dr Eve Patten |title=William Boyd |publisher= www.ContemporaryWriters.com |date= 2005 |accessdate=2007-05-21]

Cinema Adaptation

Main article:

A Good Man in Africa (1994 film)

References

External links

* [http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/boyd-africa.html"A Good Man in Africa", "New York Times", April 6th,1982 'Books of the Times', Michiko Kakutani]