A Good Man in Africa

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British Council complies with data protection law in the UK and laws in other countries that meet internationally accepted standards. Things in Morgan's personal life only get more complicated, too. Hazel gives him gonorrhea. He is still sleeping with Celia. And he's in love with Priscilla, to whom the sniveling Richard is now engaged. William Boyd grew up in Western Africa, living in both Ghana and Nigeria. He explains that the setting for the novel "is completely set in Ibadan in Western Nigeria even though I changed the names, but everybody in it is made up. It’s rooted in my autobiography in terms of its colour, texture and smells but the story is – and that’s something that’s always been the case with me – invented. There is an autobiographical element in that the character of Dr Murray is very much a two-dimensional portrait of my father." [1] Reception [ edit ] The story opens in Morgan's office at the British High Commission. His employee, the Second Secretary of the Commission, Richard Dalmire, informs Morgan of his upcoming marriage to Priscilla Fanshawe, daughter of their boss, the High Commissioner Arthur Fanshawe. Though he puts on a brave face, this news devastates Morgan. He once pursued Priscilla but did not commit fully to the relationship, sending her into Richard's all-too-eager arms. Nothing today had been remotely how he had imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events. Here he was, strolling about the battlefield looking for his missing company like a mother searching for lost children in the park.’

Characteristically, too, he doesn't completely resolve his thriller plot. "Life isn't neat and tidy in that way ... There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain." He often brings his central characters up against figures with "a very definite view of the human condition" - either someone who might be right (he mentions the Scottish doctor in A Good Man in Africa), or someone "who has a completely skewed idea of what makes the world go round but is utterly confident in it. That can be vaguely enviable: if people believe devoutly in their God, then life on earth is completely comprehensible. But for those of us who are devout atheists, it's a different matter altogether." Was he ever, so to speak, abused about these matters before he was disabused? "I don't think so. It's not as if I was lost and then found myself. It's just a process of growing up. Certain things happened early on my life that wised me up - made me see what was fundamentally important and what you could shrug off." Boyd has also published the short story collections On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Natalie ‘X’ (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008), and a collection of non-fiction, Bamboo (2005). I can't really explain why this paragraph from my novel The New Confessions (1987) haunts me - in fact, I could probably choose something similar from all 10 novels I have written. But The New Confessions was my fourth novel and the first in which I had tried out the first person singular. I think I relish it both because I feel the confidence implicit in the voice I was inhabiting and also because I sense in these few lines that my imagination is working at full capacity. I feel I am in Berlin in 1926 (and I know I have the details exactly right) and somehow I have managed to capture the subjective, contingent, imperfect view of life (John James Todd doesn't know why the bands are playing) that is the one we all have to live with. Boyd on BoydThe United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. A former television critic for the New Statesman (1981-3), William Boyd has also worked extensively as a screenwriter for both film and television. He wrote the television screenplays Good and Bad at Games (1983) and Dutch Girls (1985) (collected in book form as School Ties in 1985), and has adapted two novels by Evelyn Waugh for television: Scoop (1987) and Sword of Honour (2001). He wrote and directed the First World War film The Trench (1999) and has also adapted his own novels Stars and Bars (1988) and A Good Man in Africa (1994) for film, and Armadillo (2001), Any Human Heart (2010) and Restless (2012) for television. Boyd’s recent success in refreshing the conventions of spy fiction should serve him well in his forthcoming project of writing the next official James Bond novel, published in 2013.

As Eva gradually involves her daughter in her plans for revenge on her former spymaster with whom she was romantically involved, the novel displays many of the conventions of a romantic thriller, and in the constant role-playing and double bluffing occasioned by the spy genre, personal relationships and allegiances are perpetually at risk. In sharp contrast to the confident personal narrative of Any Human Heart, Restless marks a return, of sorts, to some of the awkward convolutions of identity which flavoured Boyd’s early fiction, and to a British social landscape still troubled by ingrained historical insecurities. The New Confessions showcases not only Boyd’s superb historical instinct but also his ability to perceive the significance of modern cultural representation through the evolution of photography, journalism and cinema. In this novel, the story of the heyday and decline of silent movies and B-westerns underlines the idea that art forms, like people, have their own biographies. The author’s attention to this fact, and to the gaps which emerge between imagination and finished work, later fuelled his 1998 spoof on the New York art world, Nat Tate, and also his forays into architecture, film and music in short fiction. He wasn't a precocious reader at that stage in his life. At Gordonstoun he wanted to be a painter, but knew his father would see art school as beyond the pale. English literature, however, was just about acceptable, and by the time he left Glasgow University, the writerly ambitions he'd conceived in Nice were "very firmly set". Seeing academia as a way to pay the rent (his father could also "see that it was vaguely a career, with a pension"), he ended up in Oxford, "teaching English as a foreign language, trying to write a thesis, teaching at St Hilda's and writing a TV column for the New Statesman - I don't know how I managed to keep all those balls in the air". His models were "people like Greene, Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. Kingsley Amis was another presence in my reading in those days. I was never drawn to magic realism or fantasy or surrealism or postmodern experimentation. I read a lot of Beryl Bainbridge, but the realist novel was what really appealed to me." Scottish author William Boyd’s novel A Good Man in Africa (1981) chronicles the life and work of Morgan Leafy, the First Secretary of the British High Commission, who accepts a post in the town of Nkongsamba in the state capital of the fictional Kinjanja region of West Africa. Set during the British colonial era, this darkly comic and irreverent novel offers a satirical look at the influences of colonization and cultural understandings of morality and ethics. William Boyd is perhaps best described as a wry historian of 20th-century life, and an ironic commentator on the ways that life has been represented, not only in literature, but in the companion genres of visual art, film and photography.

A Good Man in Africa is William Boyd's first novel, published in 1981. It won both the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel and the Somerset Maugham Award that year.

Lucio Schina lives in Rome and has a degree in prehistoric anthropology and archaeology. Winner of numerous national competitions for published short anthologies, he is the author of the short novel The Mysteries of the Island of Thara published by Bl … But Boyd’s first novel also hinted at his sensitivity to Africa as a continent bedevilled 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 his 1998 Protobiography. 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.’ And 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. He was educated at Gordonstoun School, Glasgow University and Jesus College, Oxford. Published while he was a lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, his first novel A Good Man in Africa (1981) won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. In 1983 Boyd was named by Granta as one of the 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. Boyd’s eighth novel Any Human Heart (2002), a history of the twentieth century told through the fictional journals of the novelist Logan Mountstuart, won the Prix Jean Monnet for European Literature in 2003 and was nominated for the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Restless (2006) won the 2006 Costa Novel Award. His most recent novels are Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009) and Waiting for Sunrise (2012).Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Much of Boyd’s writing utilises the awkward intersection of private and public life, and the suffering of individuals who – like the unfortunate protagonist of his screenplay Good and Bad at Games (1983) – cannot match the cultural demands of their environment. In this respect, he is also intrigued by the way in which individuals register the intimate details of their lives, something which developed into his use of a diary or journal form in several novels. In Armadillo (1998), a low-level thriller set in a London insurance company, the central character’s journal is his means of containing and interpreting the nature of coincidence, chance, unpredictability and risk in everyday life. And a diary of sorts provides the basis for Boyd’s 1987 epic, The New Confessions, in which film-maker John James Todd’s overriding obsession with Rousseau’s Confessions becomes the basis for his own confessional memoir of a life lived, through war, romance and ambition, in tandem with the twentieth century.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he re Note: WilliamPeople's attitudes to life's uncertainties are also, he thinks, a matter of temperament. As the way he discusses his bad year indicates, his own isn't self-pitying. It's easy to imagine his early life - a colonial upbringing with decolonisation in full swing, followed by boarding schools in Scotland - producing a somewhat alienated figure, but Boyd doesn't present himself as a sensitive intellectual bruised by his post-imperial personal history. His parents, who came from Fife's professional middle classes, moved to west Africa in the postwar years in part because his father had served there in the war, specialising in tropical medicine, and in part because "life was good there for a young married couple - big house, big job, servants, golf courses. And sunny." Both Ghana and Nigeria, where the family moved later, were, he says, "totally integrated societies. There was no settler class and no racial tension. It wasn't like Kenya and certainly not South Africa. But it was a privileged colonial upbringing." A new radio play, the ghost story A Haunting, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in December 2001. Longings, adapted from two short stories by Anton Chekhov and Boyd’s first work for the stage, opened at the Hampstead Theatre in London in February 2013. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. William Boyd lives in London. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, and is also an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was awarded a CBE in 2005. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.