African Comedy

A TIME TO LAUGH (191 pp.)--Laurence Thompson--Messner ($3.50).

At 17, Gadein was a stringbean of a Negro tribesman, simple and guileless as a calf, awkward as a young camel and endlessly tolerant of abuse. He wore an iron ring through his nose, and around his waist a belt of lizard skins and tinkling bells. His father Abu Zed, was the potbellied chief of three African villages, and he was thoroughly disgusted with Gadein. Smaller boys outran him and outfought him. The village girls and, indeed, the whole village, laughed at him. "Here comes the lunatic!" the young men would roar. On the night of the great feast, Abu Zed publicly labeled his son: "You pig, you frog, you hyena, you almost-Egyptian."

Portable Gods. Poor Gadein is the almost-hero of A Time to Laugh, a fine first novel by Briton Laurence Thompson. The nicest thing that can be said about A Time to Laugh is that it is a strong reminder of Joyce Gary's Mister Johnson, just about the finest novel about Africa ever written. Author Thompson is no Gary yet, but his hero, like Mr. Johnson, is that charming innocent, the unspoiled primitive man thrust into and beaten up by a world he never made. Of the two, Johnson had it better; he merely became a clerk in the British civil service. When the enlistment officer came around to see Abu Zed, the wily old chief saw a chance to get rid of his greatest nuisance. He sent Gadein off to the Buna Service Corps, a native transport outfit attached to the British army in North Africa.

In the army, of course, Gadein is about as useful as a slipped disk. He marches with a loping camel's gait, he drops his rifle in formation, he innocently lets a knavish buddy borrow and sell his equipment. Trained to become a truck driver, he smashes up a couple of vehicles, runs another over a cliff. Primitive that he is, he fervently worships his tire pressure gauge as a handy, portable god.

The army is not all bad. A native non-com accurately sizes up Gadein and helps him over the rougher spots. His British commanding officer likes him and protects him. But Gadein, in a world run by discipline, is like a giraffe staked out in a suburban garden. Inexorably, he slips down in the military social scale to latrine orderly. Inevitably he is court-martialed on false charges, convicted and sent to a detention center.

On Father's Right. In the end, even the British military realize that Gadein is not the stuff that armies are made of. Released and discharged, he makes the long trek from Cairo to his native village in Kenya. In retrospect, army life becomes just a great laugh. In the native villages, he makes a hit by simply imitating the gaits of his British officers. And, home at last, his army pay buys him a bride and a great feast. For once even his father approves of him, and allows Gadein to sit on his right. And when, at the end of the feast, Gadein slips off into the bushes with his girl, the village beams.

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