The Emperor of Ice Cream

Published in 1965, The Emperor of Ice-Cream by the expatriate North-Irish novelist Brian Moore is a coming of age novel focusing on the experiences of a young man during the early stages of WWII in Belfast. Moore’s wry and funny narration is based in part on his own experiences – he served in Ireland’s Ministry of War during WWII.

The novel’s title comes from a poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens. The poem serves several functions in the story. The fact that the protagonist enjoys Steven’s difficult poetry marks him as literate and meant for better things than his provincial surroundings. At the same time, the full meaning of the poem – the bittersweetness of choosing life over death, even when life is at its lowest point – is only revealed to the teenager at the end of the novel, when he has matured into the next phase of his life.

Our protagonist is seventeen-year-old Gavin Burke, whose middle-class, Catholic family lives in Belfast. We open on a humorous scene of Gavin having an imagined conversation with an icon of Jesus in his room. Gavin no longer believes in God – but religion is so deeply ingrained in him that he still worries that God will punish him for his lack of belief. As Gavin considers his moral code, he explains that has to deal with his Black Angel and White Angel – each lives on one of his shoulders. The White Angel no doubt gives less morally flexible advice, but “the trouble was, the Black Angel seemed more intelligent; more his sort.”



Gavin is mostly angst-ridden, unsure of himself, and suffering from living in the shadow of his successful older brother, Owen. His daily thoughts are mostly filled with alcohol and his desire for the student nurse Sally Shannon, a would-be girlfriend whose Catholicism prevents them from having sex. Gavin’s father has high expectations for his children, which Gavin can never meet now that he has failed his college entrance exams and has to wait until the next year to retake them.

Floundering and rebellious, Gavin decides to ignore his parents’ desire for him to continue going to school and also avoid finding a real job. For Gavin, the coming war is an excellent excuse to not face personal problems or make decisions about his future. As he puts it, “War was freedom. Freedom from futures.” Instead, he joins the war effort, enlisting in the FAP (the First Aid Party), an offshoot of the ARP (Air Raid Precautions). The FAP is basically an emergency wartime Red Cross.

Gavin puts on his ill-fitting uniform and immediately worries that he doesn’t look manly enough – or attractive enough to finally overcome Sally’s moral objections. His family disapproves as well. His sister, Kathy, mocks him, saying he looks like Charlie Chaplin, while his Aunt Liz, who is still in mourning for his uncle who died two decades earlier in the civil wars, declares that he reminds her of a Black-and-Tan (a British paramilitary force sent to subdue Irish rebels in the 1920s). Still, Gavin’s family is relieved that he didn’t join the British Army – they are fierce Nationalists.



When he shows up at the ARP branch, though, Gavin realizes that the men who have enlisted alongside him are mostly dregs – the place is “a paradise for parasites.” The leader is the sadistic and tyrannical Mr. Craig, who dominates and belittles the rest of the men, forcing them to do dangerous and pointless drills. Then there’s the cowardly Soldier MacBride, the sniveling Your Man Gallagher, the alcoholic Lambert, the mooching Frank Price, and the toady-ish Old Crutt. Still, all is not lost, and Gavin makes friends with the good-hearted and slightly older Freddy Hargreaves.

Freddy shows Gavin how to be the kind of man that Gavin aspires to become, leading by example rather than a lot of hot air. Through Freddy, Gavin learns that Belfast has a counterculture. He meets Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, communists and socialists, artists and poets, Protestants, and even a few gays.

The closer Gavin gets to Freddy, the more he disapproves of and finds fault with his father, whose deep antipathy for British rule has made him a supporter of Hitler. Like many Ulster residents at the start of WWII, Gavin’s father is excited that Hitler is creating chaos in England with his bombing campaign, under the assumption that their small North Irish towns would be safe from any attack because of their relative unimportance. In his neighborhood, a lot of Catholics refuse to follow the lights-out rules and instead leave lights on at night in order to guide Nazi planes.



But Gavin’s father and his ilk are in for a shocking surprise when Belfast is bombed by the Nazis. Freddy and Gavin watch the bombs from the roof of a hospital building. When they report for duty, both refuse to kneel and pray in rebellion – for Gavin, it is a moment of completely rejecting Catholicism and his father’s beliefs. The entirely of their duty is spent getting dead bodies into coffins – not the first aid and medical attention to survivors that ostensibly was the point of the ARP. When Gavin is the only one who can bear to handle the last body – that of a small boy – he realizes that he has fundamentally changed. He is no longer constantly vacillating between the Black and White Angels, but now has a new grown-up inner voice that reveals to him the final meaning of the poem “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and also points out that he has outgrown his frustrated desire for Sally Shannon.

Gavin returns to his house to find it destroyed by bombs. He sees his family packing their things to escape the city; his father acknowledges how wrong his support for Hitler was. The novel ends with the two men having a reconciliation, which puts them on the same, equalized footing as survivors of war rather than an angry father and a rebellious son.