Books with author Joyce Cave

“Splendid entertainment, a peep show and a vivid analysis, full of sympathy and abounding in madly logical ridiculousness.”The Observer“To find a novelist who saw more deeply and conveyed more truly you have to go back to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Balzac and Goethe, Mann and Hesse.”Bernard Levin“One of the best of our novelists, certainly one of the most original, in the great early tradition of Defoe and Fielding.”Elizabeth Bowen“A patient and penetrating analysis of children’s minds.”The Times Among Charley Brown’s first deeds as an evacuee to Longwater in the West Country was to let loose the local bull. Boys who one minute had taunted him with the refrain ‘Ballocky baldy’ (Charley’s lice had been evacuated from London with him), were the next minute acknowledging him as their natural leader. Charley Brown, one of Joyce Cary’s most uproarious and memorable creations, is a love and a terror. He is a quivering jelly in the hands of girls and women of any age who show him kindness; through the wild force of his imagination he holds children rapt with tales of desperate gunmen with exquisite manners and a taste for the beautiful. Delinquent and aesthete, he leads his gang into daring acts both grand and bad. As Charley’s sweetheart Lizzy Galor rightly puts it, he’s every bit as good as the movies...

“What a really great book it is – it seems as fresh, as moving, as sad as when I first read it.”Graham Greene“An American Visitor has an immediacy of reference which makes it seem as if it had been written to explain recent events in the Congo, in Kenya, and in other parts of Africa.”The New Yorker“What is best in the book is its ring of truth. The natives and the British whites speak and act with absolute naturalness... Cary misses few of the ironies of a situation in which imperfect Christians try to perfect the savage.”Time Magazine ‘The white man’s god is a lie — don’t you believe in him.’The American visitor is Marie Hasluck, a young journalist, who comes to twentieth-century Africa armed with her idealism and a sentimental belief in the Noble Savage. She plunges immediately into enthusiastic conflict with the Europeans there, all of whom have their own ideals of colonialism, and falls in love with one of them, an unconventional district officer named Bewsher who maintains precarious order among the natives by the sheer force of his personality. Marie finds out too late that there are no simple answers to Africa’s problems. It is the great virtue of AN AMERICAN VISITOR that Cary proposes none. Rather, he suggests complexity, ironically denying the reader the comfort of an attitude. The measure of his success is in the extraordinary relevance today of a book written thirty years ago.

Drawing upon Cary's own experience as a member of the Nigerian political service in 1913, An American Visitor records the impressions and awakenings of Marie, an idealistic anthropologist who believes she has discerned the Kingdom of Heaven in the village of Nok. Colonial betrayal, white prospectors who stake claims within Birri territory, and a deepening relationship with the eccentric District Officer lead Marie to re-examine the perils of her own charmed position.

“What a really great book it is – it seems as fresh, as moving, as sad as when I first read it.” Graham Greene “An American Visitor has an immediacy of reference which makes it seem as if it had been written to explain recent events in the Congo, in Kenya, and in other parts of Africa.” The New Yorker “What is best in the book is its ring of truth. The natives and the British whites speak and act with absolute naturalness... Cary misses few of the ironies of a situation in which imperfect Christians try to perfect the savage.” Time Magazine ‘The white man’s god is a lie — don’t you believe in him.’ The American visitor is Marie Hasluck, a young journalist, who comes to twentieth-century Africa armed with her idealism and a sentimental belief in the Noble Savage. She plunges immediately into enthusiastic conflict with the Europeans there, all of whom have their own ideals of colonialism, and falls in love with one of them, an unconventional district officer named Bewsher who maintains precarious order among the natives by the sheer force of his personality. Marie finds out too late that there are no simple answers to Africa’s problems. It is the great virtue of AN AMERICAN VISITOR that Cary proposes none. Rather, he suggests complexity, ironically denying the reader the comfort of an attitude. The measure of his success is in the extraordinary relevance today of a book written thirty years ago.

“Splendid entertainment, a peep show and a vivid analysis, full of sympathy and abounding in madly logical ridiculousness.” The Observer “To find a novelist who saw more deeply and conveyed more truly you have to go back to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Balzac and Goethe, Mann and Hesse.” Bernard Levin “One of the best of our novelists, certainly one of the most original, in the great early tradition of Defoe and Fielding.” Elizabeth Bowen “A patient and penetrating analysis of children’s minds.” The Times Among Charley Brown’s first deeds as an evacuee to Longwater in the West Country was to let loose the local bull. Boys who one minute had taunted him with the refrain ‘Ballocky baldy’ (Charley’s lice had been evacuated from London with him), were the next minute acknowledging him as their natural leader. Charley Brown, one of Joyce Cary’s most uproarious and memorable creations, is a love and a terror. He is a quivering jelly in the hands of girls and women of any age who show him kindness; through the wild force of his imagination he holds children rapt with tales of desperate gunmen with exquisite manners and a taste for the beautiful. Delinquent and aesthete, he leads his gang into daring acts both grand and bad. As Charley’s sweetheart Lizzy Galor rightly puts it, he’s every bit as good as the movies...

Charley is a love and a terror, a gifted and imaginative boy such as Gulley Jimson might have been. he is the hero of this sad, tender, hilarious novel, one of the most memorable Joyce Carey ever wrote, and it is high time he was introduced to American readers. Of Charley iIs My Darling, Joyce Cary said in a prefatory essay to the Carfax Edition: "Charley is a small boy, an evacuee, sent to the West Country from a London Slum. He is found to have a dirty head and has to be shaved. This gives him a bad start with the other evacuees, who, jostling for position among themselves, unite to jeer at him. But being a child with imagination and nerve, he recovers his position and self respect, and finally becomes the leader of gangs by various bold enterprises which land him in the courts.