Newsday from New York, New York • 158

REVIEW Action and love with a melancholy air Ice-Cream War" is pervaded by an ominous melan By Dan Cryer Newsday Book Critic "AN ICE-CREAM WAR," by William Boyd (Morrow, 408 $1735). William Boyd's first novel, "A Good Man in Africa," won high praise on both sides of the Atlantic for its fine writing and outrageous humor. The young lecturer in English literature at Oxford University was said to have the same kind of comedic talents that made us turn with pleasure to an Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis. With his second novel, "An Ice-Cream War," Boyd will no doubt once again garner his share of superlatives. The writing is equally sure-handed.

Boyd has crafted a quiet, seamless prose in which story and characters flow effortlessly out of a fertile imagination. But this time around Boyd is anything but funny. Like most stories set in the World War I era, "An choly, a sense of the futility of things. The wonder is, however, that the theme is not off-putting. Boyd makes us read on as though we were following an adventure-romance written by M.

M. Kaye. There is both adventure and romance in this novel, though of a decidedly low-key sort. Two brothers grow up in the well-off surroundings of an English country manor, eventually fall in love with the same woman, go off to fight the Germans in East Africa, and only one of them returns. Gabriel Cobb, 27, is the older of the two brothers.

Following the example of Major Cobb, his elderly father, he intends to make a career of the military. Brother Felix, 18, is alienated from everyone in his family except for his brother. With his mother, whose favorite he is, he shares a "silent lifelong insurrection" against the major, an authoritarian of the old school who can't comprehend the modern world. Felix rebels by flirting with atheism and But he's hardly a radical, simply a young man seeking his own way. Felix hopes to find it at Oxford, but discovers instead a lifeless campus whose ranks have been depleted by the war.

London, by contrast, is filled with bohemian excitements, but the girl he wants dismisses him as a "silly, boring little boy." He returns home to Kent, where the only interesting person around is Charis, Gabriel's wife. Friendship soon quickens into romance, and guilt begins to pile up like the fog. Thus begins a game in which there can be no winners. Meanwhile, Boyd stirs the pot in East Africa, where British and German colonies coexist uneasily as the mother countries edge toward war and then open hostilities. The war in this part of Africa as.

slippery and insubstantial as ice cream is a haphazard business of advance and retreat, with neither side gaining much except needless casualties. Officers on both sides are stupid and incompetent In Gabriel's first battle, after the tedium of training in India and a long sea voyage, he is separated from his troops "like a mother searching for lost children in the park" and then wounded and captured. Glory and heroism are victims, like Gabriel, of the utter randomness of events. Boyd never lets antiwar sentiment, however, interfere with developing the moral ambiguities of his characters. Felix' love affair with Charis is paralleled by Gabriel's less intense but no less genuine affection for Liesl von Bishop, his German nurse.

Meanwhile, a repentant Felix joins the army determined to find his brother and make amends. Fighting off East Africa's heat, rains, mosquitoes and army routine becomes a kind of purgatory before a final confrontation with evil, when his fate becomes entwined with that of Liesl's husband. Felix, Charis notes early on, "had none of Gabriel's unreflecting, stolid contentment. Felix seemed always bothered with life, suspicious of the cards it was dealing him, always weighing things up and criticizing." By the end of the novel Felix is still weighing and criticizing, but he's been educated in the truth that "we all have our secrets to keep." Charis and Felix are awash in a love they cannot prevent. Nor can they hold back the guilt, though they certainly try.

"He's away," Charis says of Gabriel, the husband who left for war shortly after the honeymoon. "He doesn't know what's happening. He never will. Well never hurt him." She is both right, and tragically wrong. "An Ice-Cream War" confronts family ties, love and betrayal as the slippery yet hard-rock realities they are.

There are no easy answers here, and the only false note seems a less than substantial depiction of Charis. The novel's several sudden shocks hit with tremendous impact because they emerge from such an understated narrative. The reader emerges deeply moved, IS SHORT INewsday's book lunch A few seats are available for Newsday's Spring Book and Author Luncheon next Tuesday at Colonie Hill in Hauppauge. Speakers will be Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, authors of The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Bobbie Bouton and Nancy Marshall, whose book, "Home Games: Two Baseball Wives Speak Out," tells what it's really like to be married to a professional athlete, and Nicholas Gage, author of "Eleni: A Savage War, A Mother's Love, and a Son's Revenge," the true story of the author's mother, who was killed in a guerrilla uprising in Greece. For tickets, call 454-2165.

ii an unusual new award sponsored by the winegrowers of Bordeaux, France. The Bordeaux Artist-in-Residence Award will pay Hansen's way to Bordeaux where he will live in a chateau in the vineyards for six weeks. The award, which is administered by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, also includes a $1,000 cash Meanwhile, PEN American Center has announced the candidates for the 1983 PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction, to be awarded in May in Washington. The six nominees are "Grace Abounding" by Maureen Howard; "Shiloh and Other Stories" by Bobbie Ann Mason; "Sea view by Toby Olson; "The Portage to San Cristobal by A.H." by George Steiner; "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" by Anne Tyler, and "Birthplace" by William S. Wilson.

Book fair The Eighth Antiquarian Book Fair sponsored by the Long Island Antiquarian Book Dealers Association will be held Saturday and Sunday, April 23 and 24, at the Human Resources Center, I.U. Willets Road and Searingtown Road in Albertson. More than 50 dealers will sell used and rare books, prints and maps at the fair, which will be open from 11 AM to 6 PM on Saturday, noon to 5 PM on Sunday. Admission is $2. Awards season A biography of American labor leader Eugene V.

Debs and a study of witchcraft in New England are the winners of Columbia University's Bancroft Prize, the institution announced last week. The awards of $4,000 each went to Nick Salvatore for "Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist," and to John Demos for "Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England." The Bancroft Prizes honor books of "exceptional merit and distinction in American history." On March 25, novelist Rudy Rucker was presented with the first Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for his novel "Software. The award honors a distinguished work of science fiction first published in paperback.

It was established in memory of science fiction writer Philip Dick, who died last year. The $1,000 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award was presented last month to Sherod Santos, a California college professor and the author of a volume of poems, "Accidental Weather." The award is given periodically by New York University. Ron Hansen, author of "Desperadoes" and a second novel to be published in the fall, is the winner of Index to features Bridge 17 ErmaBombeck 19 Ann Landers 15 Kldsday 22 Calendar 36, 37 Movies 42, 43 Comics 23-25 Problem Line 19 Crossword 24 Radio 44 Cryptoquote 17 TV 44 46 Dear Abby 17 Wordy Gurdy 24 Dixon 23 Your Money 7.