Joyce Cary (1888–1957)

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 show more 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. show less

THis is technically an incredibly impressive book; a bravura first person picaresque narrative from the mouth of the inimitable Gully Jimson. Cary never slips from the persona, offering us an artist with a fecund imagination, creative use of language, sensual love of images and women, and an irrepressible and irresponsible engagement with life at its richest. Comedy, tragedy, love and pathos mingle, often on the same page, in a novel that's rich and fruitful.

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, show more 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". show less

Joyce Cary is a kind of non-denominational Graham Greene, except that whereas Greene's characters often seem to be making decisions based on some kind of a priori which has no relationship to any of their other apparent traits or motivations, Cary's have a faith which, while often expressed in ways not compatible with conventional religion, is integral to every aspect of the character as presented. "Grace is everywhere," Cary says in his introduction to the New Directions edition, and his show more books let you see that. Prisoner of Grace is also an extremely penetrating portrait of political drive, seen through the eyes of a first person woman narrator. A significant step up in structure and narrative energy from Cary's first trilogy. show less