Sri Lanka It's Happening

July 11, 2007

Finished reading 'An Ice Cream War' by William Boyd. It's like a breath of fresh air after the trashy novels by the likes of Gerald Seymour that I read just a few weeks ago. This and the hobbit are two of the better ones that I read this year.

Like most of Boyd's novels, 'An Ice Cream War' is full of black humor, and like most of his other books the ending is not predictable. The start is slow, in between you get lots of slow motion action interspaced with bursts of scrambling.

The story is set in Africa in during the first world war. A time when Europeans still thought people of the African continent were only a little more advanced than the other species you encounter in the jungle. So officers and even soldiers have porters to carry their stuff for them and no one really cares when the brown and black skinned people die; either in battle or from disease.