Cary's Sara Monday has often been compared--quite rightly--to Moll Flanders, another irresistible, irrepressible woman of highly suspect morals. Sara's odd adventures in marriage and love make for a highly entertaining read, but you should also pay close attention to her observations of her society; for a woman of little apparent reflection, there's very little that seems to escape her notice. All three books in the Gulley Jimson triptych are remarkable, but this one has a special poignancy.

I have just reread Cary's three novels, Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and The Horse's Mouth. It is amzing that books written during the second world war should be so secure in their tone about a vanishing England and its history. Cary uses his three entirely diffeent voices - tricky sensuous woman, nervy religious dirty old man, obsessed manipulative artist- better than anyone else i know uses the limitations of the first person to show what we do and don't know about each other. His descriptions of places and things are delicious. Also I shd like to say what beautiful books the New York Review paperbacks are to handle and read. Most people know The Horse's Mouth, and many know Herself Surprised . I'm not sure To Be A Pilgrim isn't the best and most surprising of the three- which is saying something.

Art and Reality, the ways of the creative process by Joyce Cary who wrote some great fiction, including THE HORSES MOUTH, starts with 'intuition', a right brain function in today's lexicon which is what we can learn from dogs and cats and other visionaries. Discovery of some truth through intuition unleashes the creative force, and Cary knew this through his own writing. He uses examples of all the great writers, Melville, Austen et al....and the great painters...Monet who found expression in mere objects, and Picasso who could break down objects and insights into abstractions. Great book, hard to get, but worth it if you can find it.

To Be A Pilgrim is the second book in Joyce Cary's first trilogy, and should ideally be read in its proper place with the others (Herself Surprised and The Horse's Mouth). Cary once said that people liked The Horse's Mouth because it was funny. To Be A Pilgrim has less of that uproarious humor, which may be why it is less popular than its two companions. But this middle volume is the most ambitious of the three. It is the story of Tom Wilcher, lawyer and member of the love triangle between housekeeper Sara Monday and modern artist Gully Jimson. Now an old man who is being treated as an incompetent by his young relatives (who are locked in a triangle of their own), Tom tells us his life story, starting from childhood. Filled with the Cary's brilliant characters, this book asks hard questions, especially about sex.

Don't miss it!

Unlike other reviewers I cannot praise this book. It has its moments - passages of writing that let us enter the mind of an artist - but most of it I found tedious. Being just about believable the main character is easily the best of a thin an unconvincing bunch. The novel hasn't aged well and the story line is silly and not very interesting. The humour escaped me. I haven't read the other parts of the trilogy and nothing about this book encourages me do so.

The Horse's Mouth is the concluding volume in Joyce Cary's first trilogy. It is the story of Gully Jimson, a gifted artist but a selfish and erratic man. However, his sense of humor, even at his own misfortunes, make him an interesting character. Although this is the third volume in a trilogy, you need not have read the first two to enjoy this one. When you have read the trilogy, however, you will appreciate Cary's ability to create characters who view the world in distinct ways. As a painter, Jimson has a strong visual sense, and so this book has much more detailed descriptions of what he sees than is provided by the narrators of the first two books in the trilogy.

Jimson is a thoroughly believable artist, who is in many ways a scoundrel but who also possesses a genuine creative gift. He reminds us of the great gap that often exists between the artists who create and the staid academics who later analyze their works. The book is a minor classic, and The New York Review of Books should be congratulated at restoring it to print, as it has with a number of other important, but out of print, novels. If you read this book, you will certainly want to go back and read the others in the trilogy, Herself Surprised and To Be a Pilgrim.

Especially at smug "artists," fatuous critics, and clueless collectors. This book has a strong appeal for the little boy knows who knows there are many kings and queens running around buck naked.

This book is a collection of five lectures given in 1960 by the author, Douglas Stewart. Each lecture focuses on the unifying religious themes in five 20th Century authors: James Joyce (apocalytypticism), Aldous Huxley (mysticism), Graham Greene (Catholicism), Rose Macauley (Anglicanism) and Joyce Cary (Protestantism).

Stewart writes well in impressive, quotable language. He also weaves in comparisons of the featured novelists to other great writers. I can see where this book would be useful to someone writing a research paper. However, for someone like me who is just looking for insight into a couple of great minds from the past century, there really isn't anything earth-shattering in this book. Yes, James Joyce's rejection of religion, particularly Catholism, is apparent in his works. Yes, mystical union with God (which Stewart calls "detachment") is pervasive in Aldous Huxley's works. Yes, Graham Greene's work portrays characters whose lives conflict with their Catholicism. I didn't find much in these lectures that wasn't obvious.

Stewart did issue an intriguing challenge concerning the works of Aldous Huxley -- he claims that a chronological reading of Huxley's works will demonstrate Huxley's spiritual journey to increasing detachment and pessimism. I'm no expert on Huxley, but from what I've read, I see just the opposite -- a journey from the utter hopelessness seen in his early novels to the meaningful, rich and happy inner life implicit in the later novels and explicit in his religious essays.

"Mister Johnson", by Joyce Cary, is a tale of an intriguing, quixotic native character, set in colonial Nigeria. Cary draws on his own experiences as a colonial official in Nigeria, drawing a rich, topical, authentic picture of the country during the early thirties. The eponymous anti-hero, referred to only as "Johnson", is a pathetic creation who sees himself as an enthusiast for Empire, a champion of progress and civilisation, with the King of England numbering among his friends. In reality, he is despised by his European boss, Rudbeck, as a member of an inferior race. Johnson's life, his attempt to to become more English than the English, is set precariously between these two extremes -- the urgings of superiority and the reality of degradation, eventually leading him to the gallows. The story's culmination, involving larceny, treachery and murder, sees Johnson emerging as a pathetic but genuinely human creation, whose plight is an illustration of a genuine human dilemma.

Not Honour More is part of a trilogy that includes the flawless Prisoner of Grace and the dull, annoying Except the Lord. NHM falls in between the two for interest--essential reading for anyone who fell in love with Nina Latter, the first person voice of Prisoner. The teller of this version of the trilogy's events is Jim Latter--passionately but selfishly in love with his cousin Nina (married to another man) and a trial to his family who ships him off to the foreign service in Africa. Self-absorbed and self-deceived, yet in a way selflessly devoted to the Africans he is "in charge of" (coming to rebel against his own government), selflessly (or not?) devoted to his ideals, his "honour," Jim is rather charmless, undeniably exasperating, yet a masterfully delineated and realistic, fully-rounded character. His view of events will come as a shock to those who have read Nina's perceptions, yet one can understand his "reality." Reading about the politics and putting up with him may be heavy weather, but for the reader who persists (probably for Nina's sake), the reward will be ample.

Since I haven't read any of Joyce Cary's other works, I really can't comment on the literary value of this book as one of his first forays into writing. But as a first-hand account of the first Balkan War in 1912/13 on the Montenegrin front, it hardly functions at all. Cary makes very clear early in this memoir that the sole reason he volunteered to do Red Cross work was in search of "adventure" - as only a pampered upper middle class turn-of-the-century British youth could. There is never any recognition of the fact that his "adventure" is for other people a matter of life and death, nor of all the misery that wars bring. And this sets the tone for the entire book: Cary writes about his Red Cross colleagues and their mundane day-to-day activities, and occasionally about some of the "colorful locals" they have to deal with. The war that forms of the backdrop and raison d'etre for Cary's entire "adventure" almost fades away. He only writes about actual battles he witnessed a few times, and here his primary interest is the tactics used by the various armies to take a few yards of territory; he hardly takes note of the casualties falling left and right, which is nothing short of astonishing from a Red Cross worker who had to help in their treatment. After reading this, I felt that Cary was either in massive denial or he was just incredibly insensitive and self-centered. Cary also devotes much of the narrative to food and the preparation of meals (he also served as cook) and basically his only justification for this is that, in essence, there was nothing more exciting to write about. Somehow I just couldn't sympathize with the fact that the Balkan wars failed to thrill him sufficiently. Generally then, this book fails both as a testament to the Balkan wars, since the author was almost completely uninterested in their course or their wider social and political implications, and even as literature: the narrative is often simply tiresome. Perhaps the only value of this text is that it is an early documentation of war tourism in the Balkans, something that would really take off during the 1990s when the wars in Croatia and Bosnia started.