Joyce CaryRecensioni

I had always imagined from reading the blurbs about this book that it was in some way comic. It isn't. I was reminded of the miasmic sense of futility that pervaded George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant".
Mister Johnson suffers from the "Big Man" syndrome. He imagines wealth and the good things in life are his due because he has a chief clerk's job in a District office of the Nigerian Colonial Service. He is inept; he steals, he borrows irresponsibly, he lies and is a farcical husband.
Meanwhile, the District Officer sees the opportunity of a road building project as a lasting memorial to his term of tenure at his otherwise tedious posting.
All transactions are corrupt in this dusty set-up. Accounts are falsified, money diverted, the roading project brings only overcrowding and no prosperity.
There is no resolution to the colonial divide, and it is Cary's genius that drives home the futility of colonial administration amid the chronically corrupt and mean culture of the native population. The final scenes are a devastating commentary on the whole sorry story.

Ez egy olyan könyv, ami felkanyarodik az M7-esre, és kettesben döcög le egész a Balatonig. Ami nem önmagában rossz, hanem a táj, illetve az utazók lelkiállapotának függvényében. A zarándok elbeszélője idős korában tér vissza (nem igazán önszántából) az udvarházba, ahol gyermekkorát töltötte, és visszaréved életpályájára. A jelenkori fejezetek és a múlt eseményeinek leírásai hol egymást váltogatják, hol egymásba fonódnak – előbbit leginkább őt felügyelő unokahúgával és unokaöccsével kialakított kapcsolata határozza meg (tehát a generációs konfliktusra épül), utóbbi pedig a szokásos családregény-sémákon túl történelmi analógiát is kínál: ahogy elbeszélőnk beleöregszik a jelenidőbe, teste és elméje pedig egyre romlik, úgy épül le körülötte lassacskán a brit világbirodalom is – hogy aztán az 1930-as évek legvégén, a háború hajnalán elbúcsúzzunk mindkettejüktől.

Fanyar, enyhén archaizáló szöveg ez, amit meghatároz egy mélységes szkepszis a válozásokkal szemben*, valamit a szereplők hithez való viszonya**. Érződik rajta, hogy sokat akar nyújtani az olvasónak: egyfajta szintézist az elmúló idő és az elmúló ember kapcsolatáról. Cary mesterien teremt meg bizonyos figurákat és távolságtartó, mégis élő képet rajzol az angol vidékről – ugyanakkor a könyv gerincét az elbeszélő belső monológjai alkotják. És hát (valljuk meg) ez a szereplő túl sokat moralizál. Ezzel pedig elsősorban az a baj, hogy amíg ezek az eszmefuttatások a maguk idejében talán pontosan megragadták a korszak bizonyos problémáit, most túlsúlyuk miatt valahogy légüres térbe kerül a regény. Másfelől a posztmodern írói trükkök finom alkalmazása (például az idősíkok egybefonása) az epikus elbeszélői technikával vegyítve egykor bizonyára figyelemreméltó aktus volt, most viszont már nem sok újat nyújt az olvasónak. Ettől függetlenül állítom, hogy Cary nagy tehetségű és fontos író. Kicsit talán berozsdásodtak az izületei.

* Ugyanakkor ezt a szkepszist mértékkel szabad az írói véleménnyel azonosítani, annál is inkább, mert A zarándok egy trilógia második része, amiben minden egyes rész más és más aspektusból vizsgálja az öregedés és a világtól való elbúcsúzás folyamatát. Magam az első részt (Magam se hittem) valamikor az őskorban olvastam, ott egy idős, naiv, egykor könnyűvérű hölgyet beszéltetett Cary, így értelemszerűen a végkicsengés is más volt. Mondjuk arra a kötetre már csak (nagyon) nagy vonalakban emlékszem, úgyhogy feledhetetlen könyv… az speciel nem lehetett.
** Nem véletlenül használom a „hit” fogalmat. Nagyon sokáig nem értettem, hogy mi az az enyhén nyugtalanító érzés, ami elfog, ahányszor a szereplők szóba hozzák a vallást e könyv lapjain – aztán rájöttem: talán még sosem hallottam ennyit beszélni irodalmi figurákat a hitről úgy, hogy ilyen kevésszer beszéltek volna közben Istenről. Nem tudom, ennek az okai az anglikán egyház sajátosságára vezethetőek-e vissza, mindenesetre azt hiszem, sokat elmond a szereplők gondolkodásmódjáról.

Joyce Cary's last novel, written in distressing circumstances. He was increasingly immobilised by motor neurone disease and a photograph from his biography "Gentleman Rider" by Alan Bishop (1988) shows him at work with the aid of slings and pulleys to manage.
The novel expresses an awareness of his impending end. It presents a conflict between faith-healing and established church views counter to the phenomenon.
Both opponents, Preedy the faith-healer and Sison the curate, are captives. Their captivity results from their both being bound up and driven by fear, jealousy, egoism and passions good and bad. The death of a child, as a result of neglect by a parent under the influence of the faith-healer, crushes the curate's conventional Christianity; that is, until finally he receives a communication from someone else, who reveals that the death of her child has wrought a miracle of eventual forgiveness and peace in her world.
This book also develops the theme of media interest in faith-healing during the late 1950's, as witnessed in the Billy Graham crusades. Alongside the the contest of wills of the religious characters is an equally earnest one at board level of "The Argus" newspaper, suffering declining readership. Hooper, a nasty piece of work, is hired to pursue the interest in religious affairs of the time. His position also becomes that of a captive to the zeal and impassioned points of view of newspaper board, clergy and those unfortunates swept up in this tide of rigid beliefs about what really constitutes the miracle of God's love in the world.
Good writer - good reading.

Reading "The Horse's Mouth": hard to get into. I see why it didn't sell much here: too rich a surface, all knots and spurtings of philosophy, but only as emanation from the bumpy colored surface of life, not imposed on it. Plot not spare and obvious, but a spate of anecdotes. Podgy old Sara eternal as Eve, Alison, wife of bath. This old battered hide: needs a brain and a creative verve to make it liveable in, a heater in the ratty house.

BG-4

The second part of a trilogy, written last. It is the story of the early life of Chester Nimmo who grows up in a poor fundamentalist family on the moors in Devon in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
It traces the growing disbelief of the boy in adventist religion and a consequent realisation of the power dynamics between rich and poor..
What makes this special is Cary's talent for illustrating these shifting and developmental ideas in our hero using the rural and village personalities to do it. In this case the religious foundation of Nimmo's childhood is the impulse for the political philosophy (19th Century Radicalism) that is a theme in the other two volumes in this trilogy. Simply put, Cary's view is the creative imagination is interwoven with one's religious imagination.

This story is a slice of life of a formerly popular painter. The public has deserted him, the bottle seems a devoted friend, and his current obsession is large wall murals of generously proportioned women. A friend is using him as a house sitter, but, will find a good deal more art in his house than he had when he left. The main character is designed to be charming, and impish (the film cast Alec Guinness in the part), but I was left with a less encouraged view of the bohemian and its role in enlightened British life.½

A chilling story of the gradual corruption of a village magistrate and his chief clerk. Set in Nigeria, in the thirties, Mr. Johnson starts as a loyal servant of the empire, and continues so, all the way to the completely frightening conclusion. A vivid experience, and not to be missed.

Gully Jimson must go down in the annals of literature of one of the most compelling first person narrators. With all the self-knowledge of a gnat, he reveals the complexity of a narcissistic, degenerate, lovable genius. Rarely have I so wanted to slap a character around the chops (and I am not violent) while simultaneously hugging him and protecting from his insane, creative, compulsive self. I bought the book when it was on my reading list as an undergrad, for a paper entitled "The Twentieth Century Novel," in 1982, but it somehow wriggled out of my commitments for the year and remained, languishing on my shelves, unread until now. Had I read in in 1982 it would have been one of my favourite books for the year and for my entire undergrad reading programme. The question now is whether, forty years later, and as a much slower reader, I should devour more Cary. The Horse's Mouth is sheer delight.

Marvellous reading. The eternal problem of women, and the received wisdom with respect to sex is at issue here. Three sisters who have all accepted Victorian attitudes to chastity, and who hold refined sentiment paramount, discover that loathing, depression and hypocrisy corrupt them as the decades pass. Ella, the most examined of the three, and the most injudiciously treated, has a daughter Amanda, who must herself cope with a new feminine identity striving to be recognized in a new age, determinedly not Victorian.
The action takes place at different times from Victorian to a "present" in the summer of 1938. And during this time the centrality of a woman to family life, and the family as a fundamental aspect of civilization, was blown away to be replaced by modern ideas, which had not yet resolved the problems of work, money, suffering etc.
Interestingly, Cary says women's freedom "like all freedom, means work and suffering, insecurity and the endless anxiety of moral choice; and yet it is the most precious thing they have. It is the soul of their dignity as modern women".

Gulley Jimson was quite a character but on the whole I felt that the humor in this book was more of the sort which made me smile inwardly than the sort which make me laugh aloud.½

That’s it,’ I said. ‘It’s the jaws of death. Look at me. One of the cleverest painters who ever lived. Nobody ever had anything like my dexterity, except Rubens on a good day. I could show you an eye—a woman’s eye, from my brush, that beats anything I’ve ever seen by Rubens. A little miracle of brushwork. And if I hadn’t been lucky I might have spent the rest of my life doing conjuring tricks to please the millionaires, and the professors. But I escaped. God knows how. I fell off the tram. I lost my ticket and my virtue. Why, your ladyship, a lot of my recent stuff is not much better, technically, than any young lady can do after six lessons at a good school. Heavy-handed, stupid looking daubery. Only difference is that it’s about something—it’s an experience, and all this amateur stuff is like farting Annie Laurie through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble? What I say is, why not do some real work, your ladyship? Use your loaf, I mean your brain. Do some thinking. Sit down and ask yourself what’s it all about.’

—The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary

I’ve never read a book so true to the character of a true artist. So scathing of other’s art while damning the whole enterprise and his paltry participation in it. I thoroughly loved this book and its frank appraisal of all things faked, true or, more likely, some combination of the two.

Several pages in, the binding started to crack and I had to tape up the entire side. But tricky, unsticky, recalcitrant page eighty-seven kept popping out the book for the rest of the journey. Like a buzzing fly that’s too savvy or drunk on morning sunlight to land in a suitable place for pestered human hands to swat. And if the physical aspect of this mass market paperback seemed to match the dilapidation of Gulley Jimson’s approach to relationships, art and life, well then, that’s fine by me. This worn-out copy’s got a life all its own.½

A great story of a rascally old painter who harasses his only patron with phone calls and lives in poverty. He is an outstanding artist but socially inept in dealing with people. Cary writes so well, you practically live the story as you read it. This is the only one of the series I kept.

This is an interesting book about juvenile delinquency in wartime. Not that the second world war figures largely in the lives of the characters. There is no doubt about Charley's delinquency but his motives are misunderstood. This book is bread and butter stuff. Not particularly good and not particularly bad. There is not much universality about it.

'this sordid, sensual, gradual deterioration of a human soul'
By sally tarbox on 13 Jun. 2014
Format: Paperback
The novel opens with Sara Monday being sent to jail, described by the judge as an 'unhappy example of that laxity and contempt for all religious principle and social obligation.'
In her narrative, however, we come to know - and somewhat understand - Sara. From her youth, qualifying as a cook and marrying the son of the house, her encounters with other individuals, up to her unfortunate end, Sara develops into an extraordinarily kind and generous person...
I should be interested to read the other two books in this trilogy, each based around one of the characters in the story.
Very well written and compelling. Don't know if I'm the only one to think this, but Cary's writing puts me in mind of that of Barbara Comyns (without Comyns' humour or peculiar grammar).½

A wonderful book, and I can't do it justice after only one reading. My notes here are only my first thoughts, so be generous.

Tom Wilcher, the employer of housekeeper Sara Monday from the first book in this trilogy, Herself Surprised, recounts his life from near its end. As he sees it, his life has had 3 great waves: the first was during the tumultuous years from his birth somewhere in (I'm guessing) the 1870s to the First World War, which saw massive social unrest in Great Britain that brought his brother and him into progressive politics; the second was his middle-aged years when he returned from the army and settled into practicing law and looking after the family estate (purchased, not inherited, by his father); and the final wave sees him preparing for his death, marshalling the passing-on of the estate to his niece and nephew during the troubled years leading up to WWII.

This might sound a little prosaic, but Tom is full of contradictions and wonderful observations, and all of the characters he comments on are a delight. My favourites are his brother Bill and Bill's wife Amy. Bill is a professional soldier, who decides he needs to marry in the two weeks he is home on leave. A practical soul, he judges that none of the local belles will accept and marry him that quickly, so he seeks out Amy, a shy, homely 17 year old orphan. They proceed to squabble amicably through decades of marriage. Tom describes them with such affection that I really looked forward to any mention of them.

Tom himself is, in turns, religious, lecherous, insightful, blind and honest as far as his own limited understanding of his motivations allows, but above all, he is a pilgrim. The idea of being a pilgrim, referenced in the title of the novel and taken from a line in a hymn attributed to Bunyan, is alluded to several times in the novel with variations. I'm sure I didn't catch all of them, but from what I can piece together, Tom sees himself as a pilgrim seeking Christian faith and grace, but at the end of his life, he also comes to understand his country as a pilgrim that is constantly seeking a way to be heaven on earth and is never satisfied with its current condition.

The 3 waves of Tom's life are not told in a single chronological order; rather the 3 waves are threaded together, one paralleling or offering a contrast to another.

Wonderful book, and should be far better known than it is.

Masterful character depictions not limited to the titular character nor other native people of Nigeria, but the white "overlords" as well--from Pig's-Neck to his wife and even barelly sketched minor characters. Mister Johnson himself is a tragi-comic character who makes us laugh along with, and a bit *at,* and love this absurd man who, in the end, just wants to make everyone happy. Using colourful words that may be politically incorrect today, Cary can be forgiven for using words of his generation; the book was published 1939. And he (i neer knew Joyce was a 'he') shows great empathy for his character. Truly a pleasure.

This is a joy of a book. Sara Monday is one of the most honestly created characters in English literature. She is at her most loveable when she is at her most despicable. I just couldn't help but love her, warts and all. She is probably more an Everywoman character more than most would like to admit.

This is a joy of a book. Sara Monday is one of the most honestly created characters in English literature. She is at her most loveable when she is at her most despicable. I just couldn't help but love her, warts and all. She is probably more an Everywoman character more than most would like to admit.

This is a joy of a book. Sara Monday is one of the most honestly created characters in English literature. She is at her most loveable when she is at her most despicable. I just couldn't help but love her, warts and all. She is probably more an Everywoman character more than most would like to admit.

A remarkable novel about the tensions between Africans and colonials in British colonial West Africa. Read from today's perspective the portrayal of the Africans may seem caricatured and racist, but reading form a period perspective it is actually remarkable nuanced and sympathetic, especially in its recognition that the situation was complex, with various tribal groups and religious constituencies vying for power on the one hand, and a far from unified position among the British, on the other. The plot centers on British-educated Aladai who returns to Nigeria with western values, ans expecting to be treated as the cultured man that he is, as he was in England. Almost immediately it becomes clear that he is not accepted by the whites, and doesn't really fit in with his tribal kinsmen either. Political and romantic tensions develop, and there is a tragic ending after a tribal uprising. Cary's prose is remarkably vivid; descriptions, even of faces can occupy a paragraph, and everything is highly colored. Given this fact, the climactic war and the tragic deaths of many of the main characters fall disappointingly flat, with even teh survivors not noticeably affected. Odd.½

I don't think this is Cary's best work. I had more fun with "Mr. Johnson", or "The Horse's Mouth". A woman moves through the larger currents of English life from 1900 to 1946. I found it rather "by the Numbers".

Sara Monday is a sweet-natured rogue, a kind of 20th century Moll Flanders, and this is the story of her career as cook, wife, artist's muse and... well, no spoilers. Sara always seems to turn her setbacks into benefits to herself and to those she loves; it's a pleasure to see how her mind works. She is, however, a surprise to herself--hence the title.

One of the beauties of the book is Sara's gift of description. Here is a random sample:

The sun was so bright as a new gas-mantle--you couldn't look at it even through your eyelashes, and the sand so bright gold as deep-fried potatoes. The sky was like washed-out Jap silk and there were just a few little clouds coming out on it like down feathers out of an old cushion; the rocks were so warm as new gingerbread cakes and the sea had a melty thick look, like oven glass.

770. The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Cary (read 23 Feb 1964) Even after 50 years I still remember that I found this book very boring.

Rose only ever wanted the best for her family, but this didn’t always go down well, especially not with Ella. After Rose dies, Ella is convinced that she has killed her and her imagined guilt eats away at her. She begins to realise that Rose might have been right after all, and so Ella tries to help Amanda just like Rose would have done. The only problem is that Amanda does not want her Aunt interfering in her love life.

Ella is constantly reminiscing about her past. This means that the story jumps from past to present and back again with little warning. This is a bit confusing, but helps to show that Ella is living in the past and is deeply affected by past events.

I found the story a bit slow to get into because not a lot happens near the beginning. I found Ella really annoying, and I wished that the story would concentrate more on Amanda because I quite liked her.