Word: alabasa
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JIMMY RIDDLE, by Ian Brook (317 pp.; Putnam; $3.95) has as its hero the Walter Mitty ideal of every British public-school boy who grew up to be a frustrated colonial civil servant. Blond, bronzed and rugged, Jimmy Riddle is district commissioner of darkest Alabasa province in an unnamed British Colony in West Africa, a living legend to his fellow officers, and the sex-dreamboat of their wistful wives. In the end, Riddle turns against his own bumbling government, gets together with the Balabasa of Alabasa, the paramount chief and head of the Python Cult, and declares Alabasa an independent...
This gives Author Ian Brook (a pseudonym) plenty of opportunity to rib the retreating Empire right up to No. 10 Downing Street, and to fire deft, satiric shots at everybody from an American anthropologist studying illiteracy among Alabasa's albinos to the new class of boorish, lawyer-bred African politicians ("The Prime Minister of the Colony laughed and picked at the hard skin on the ball of his foot"). Except for a dramatically faulty attempt to give Jimmy a realistic love affair, out of keeping with the otherwise admirably sustained, two-dimensional tone of spoof, Jimmy Riddle emerges...
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