I loved this book and was quite surprised to see so many one star reviews. I think fans of Evelyn Waugh and of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim will like it. It helps if you don't mind the protagonist being a reprehensible character.

A very unlikable protagonist, but tbh most of the characters weren't that likeable! When I started this one, I wasn't sure it would grab me that much, but it sort of grew on me and I wanted some sort of redemption for Morgan Leafy. I didn't quite see the comedic value and it certainly didn't make me laugh out loud! I reckon my actual rating is 3.5🌟as my brain did wander off at times, but rounding up 😊

Morgan Leafy is a great tragi-comic character. This is a good story with a lot of humour.

Overweight, beleaguered Morgan Leafy, a minor official in the fictional African country of Kinjaja, muddles his way through a series of misadventures. He faces scandal, blackmail, and venereal disease, as well as a righteous Scottish doctor, whom he must attempt to bribe. A very funny novel, with solid, human characters and wonderfully bizarre situations that are nevertheless more believable than, say, Tom Sharpe’s. The plot unfolds compellingly, in three parts, with the middle part a flashback,...

This was William Boyd's award winning first novel so I thought I would give it a try after having LOVED Restless. This is dated and terrible, not at all funny. Don't waste your time. I kept hoping it would get better and it didn't. If I had known I wouldn't have wasted my time.

"Like Rome, Nkongsamba was built on seven hills, but there the similarity ended. Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from the air it resembled nothing so much as a giant pool of crapulous vomit on somebody's expansive unmown lawn. Every building was roofed with corrugated iron in various advanced stages of rusty erosion, and from the window of the Commission -- established nobly on a hill above town -- Morgan could see the roofs stretch before him, an ochrous tin checker-board, a bilious met...

I found this book absolutely hilarious. I was literally in hysterics for an entire 20 page chapter - my husband was looking at me in awe as I have not laughed that long or hard in ages, and as he says, "I am a hard audience." That being said, it's not a riot throughout, but Boyd develops the characters so well that he can pull this off artfully. Having lived in Africa and England, I really appreciated Boyd's characters in all their Africanness and their Britishness. Morgan Leafy is an aspiring d...

Setting: 'Kinjanja', West Africa. In his debut novel, William Boyd tells the story of Morgan Leafy, secretary to the British High Commissioner in the town of Nkongsamba - a thoroughly-jaded and not particularly likeable character who has been in the country for several years and, although generally disliking it, has no particular ambition to do anything else. Through his often well-meaning actions, Morgan gets involved in blackmail, adultery, body-snatching, election-tampering and bribery - and

The author's first novel. In this case, as is often true with first novels, the early Boyd gets the worm. This book is an over the top, scathing indictment of the English colonial presence in Africa. The protagonist, Morgan Leafy, is a minor colonial official in a fictional west African country. Attack fiction is fine, but the Leafy of the early pages is such a total waste (moral, human, intellectual, sexual, you name it) that I almost quit reading. Sure, his situations are ridiculous (not real

My actual rating for this book is a 3.5. I really enjoyed reading it, but I had to take periodic breaks because poor Morgan’s life was such a shitshow, it just got overwhelming. Half of the crap is from other people, like his boss Fanshawe. And half of the crap is of his own making, Like Hazel and Celia. But you do feel like he’s asked to put up with more than anyone can reasonably handle. Anyway, it was a good tragicomedy that was more fun than I expected.

My second book club book turned up trumps, thanks to my fellow member for recommending this to the group.The folly of imperial Africa is laid bare. The personality of diplomatic relationships exposed. Power and lust collide. All told through the eyes of an imperfect Englishman struggling to make a name for himself.At times funny, shocking, intriguing or all at once. A page turner with a good story that moves cleverly between time periods.Will read more of Boyd now.

Completely politically incorrect and savagely funny. An antidote to the neurotic political correctness of the modern day. By invoking a particular type of erudite British humour, William Boyd and his hero Morgan Leafy are following in the footsteps of Kingsley Amis and Jim Dixon. This novel is a delightful satire of the British pretensions to influence in Africa.

A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd10 out of 10This novel is astounding, phenomenal and it confirms the admiration that I have gained for the author after reading another splendid work, An Ice-Cream War.The thought provoking booking left yours truly wondering who is The Good Man in Africa, for the most obvious answer may not apply in this case.Morgan Leafy, the First Secretary to the British High Commission in Nkongsamba, the second most important city in the West African country of Kinjanja, s...

I didn't realise until seeing other reviews that this was Boyd's first book. I was so glad to discover that for I was concerned he'd lost his touch. One of the things I really love about his books is how well he knows Africa. Of course, he's also a great storyteller.In this one, all the component parts were present, but it was all done with a sledgehammer rather than his usual deft touch.

I loved this book. Boyd succeeds in so many phases. Before breaking down the successful elements of this impressive work, let's first get some housekeeping out of the way.The story features British diplomat Morgan Leafy who is assigned to the British Embassy in the African republic of Kinjanja. Over the Christmas holiday and days prior to an important national election, Leafy become embroiled in a series of absurd and curious scenarios. He seems to be a lightening rod for bad luck and self-infli...

Not a likeable character in sight and had no desire to find out what happened in the end, but ploughed on nonetheless. A damn shame there isn’t a 3.5/5. I’ll give Boyd the benefit of the doubt.

There is an exchange about halfway through this story where the story’s only morally decent character tells our morally ambivalent “hero” to beware confusing “seeming” and “being”. This is in many respects the underlying theme of “A Good Man in Africa”. The story is set in a small town in Africa where the remnants of an old British colonial outpost try to maintain their influence with local politicians. On the surface, our “hero” Morgan is the frontman for these machinations and everything he d

Anyone with a name like Morgan Leafy is bound to have troubles. His career has wandered onto a jungle path and got lost. He's freckled, balding, going to fat. Within the Foreign Office, he's a second-stringer if ever there was one: not Oxbridge, not connected to the right people (or any people, for that matter) and stuck in a provincial backwater in west Africa as second-in-command to an about-to-retire has-been diplomat who spent his entire career in the Orient until, presumably because of his

3.5★Morgan Leafy is a civil servant in the early 1970s Foreign Service posted to the small (mythical) country of Kinjanja in Africa. He simultaneously has inferiority and superiority issues -- he walks around with a huge chip on his shoulder but feels innately more important than any of the Africans. While this dicotomy is exaggerated in this satire, I suspect that it is not uncommon in people with Foreign Service postings in out-of-the-way places in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. However, Boyd's s...

The blurb on the back cover made this sound like a fun book to read. After reading the first 7 pages I was bored with the writing style - the author keeps mentioning things that have happened to the protagonist, but then doesn't fully expand on them. Unfortunately, we already know these titbits of information as they are on the back cover - they need to be expanded!! Flicking through the rest of the book I realised I hadn't seemed to miss much by heading to the end - all in all, a dissappointmen...

Wow! I love William Boyd's versatility. The humor in the book is a side-splitting at some of his action novels are nail-biting. Poor Morgan Leafy, he has a lot on his plate as we are introduced to him, and the novel does a great job of ratcheting up that tension in the first section and then retracing the steps--almost entirely missteps--that led him to all his predicaments. It is that subtle British humor, though, that provides the glue to stick all these scenes together and keeps us turning on...

An entertaining book, well written, of course. The main character is a fairly repulsive sort who does at times do something right. I might have given another star, but the ending sort of fizzled out (or maybe I failed to understand it). Most other characters are venial, incompetent, or corrupt, but this is revealed slowly through the book. The background is vividly described, the heat, the chaos, and the poverty. An interesting, and at times entertaining, read.

I do just love all of Boyd’s writing and this quick witted, stressful tale of a man just trying to do the right thing while also remaining self obsessed (narcissistic almost) meant you never felt an ounce of sympathy for him, just complete disbelief that someone could be so hopeless. Just do the right thing smorgasbord for Christ sake. Effortlessly told, it is astonishing that this was his first novel as portions of his descriptive narrative are better than anything he has written since.

Very British style of humour in a story full of interactions between entertaining characters. Funny enough at times to have me laugh out loud and my wife to wonder what was going on. My eye skipped over various overly descriptive passages but well worth the read.

Nice satire about lower rank diplomat posted at the forgotten town in forgotten country.

A funny read. Very over the top which sometimes was OK sometimes too extreme. I skimmed to the end. I don't think I cared enough about any of the protagonists. The book probably suffers from being a first book, one review referred to a sledgehammer and it did feel a bit like that everything was extreme, exaggerated . I enjoyed his later books more.

Very funny, Lucky Jim in Africa!

It's funny, the prose is super, and the book is a fine examination of so many tripwires one can hit while representing his/her country abroad. The characters are richly drawn, and it's just as timely as it was when published in the early '80s.

This novel struck me as a mash-up of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim and any number of Graham Greene’s novels (though I’d lean towards The Honorary Consul). While the main character is experiencing the displacement of being in a foreign environment as an emissary of an occupying/controlling nation, much as Greene’s characters do in those several Englishman-in-outpost-Empire novels, he does not suffer in the same fashion as Greene’s protagonists from the torments of conscience. Instead, in a rather bump...

This is the first William Boyd I have read. I found it grew on me and in the end I could not put it down. For much of it, I found Morgan's predicament too predictable and painful to be really funny. And the characters and plot are right outside my own experience. So it was difficult to connect. But in the end I enjoyed the imaginative flights and convoluted morality. Also Boyd manages to change his reader's viewpoint , so the climax is really edgy. It was interesting to compare with Conrad's "He...