Sidney Monas,Hudson Review
Cary has a gift of humanity.... His humor shows no traces of carrion under the fingernails. His prose...suffuses his perceptions with all the vitality of a language well used and hard thought over.


Book Description
People lie to themselves and lie to each ot her, and the lies they tell become their lives. Tom Wilcher, the hero of the second volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, has been at various times a political activist , a closefisted lawyer, a self-sacrificing brother, and a dirty old man. But as he f aces death his unfulfilled spiritual yearnings are uppermost in his mind. Each volume of Cary's trilogy, which begins with Herself Surprised and continues in The Horse's Mouth, brings a single character to intense and memorable life an d can be read entirely on its own. But when read together the three books, with thei r three strikingly different narrators, afford new and startling perspectives on eac h other. In the end, the trilogy offers a sweeping vision, at once funny and sad, sy mpathetic and satirical, of humanity in all its fallenness and freedom. It is the ma sterwork of a writer of dazzling insight and verbal resource, and one of the outstan ding landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.


About the Author
Joyce Cary (1888-1957) was born in Ireland and studied to be a painter before serving in the British military and civil service in West Africa. In 1920 he returned to England and devoted himself to writing.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

People lie to themselves and lie to each other, and the lies they tell become their lives. Tom Wilcher, the hero of the second volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, has been at various times a political activist, a closefisted lawyer, a self-sacrificing brother, and a dirty old man. But as he faces death his unfulfilled spiritual yearnings are uppermost in his mind.

Each volume of Cary's trilogy, which begins with Herself Surprised and continues in The Horse's Mouth, brings a single character to intense and memorable life and can be read entirely on its own. But when read together the three books, with their three strikingly different narrators, afford new and startling perspectives on each other. In the end, the trilogy offers a sweeping vision, at once funny and sad, sympathetic and satirical, of humanity in all its fallenness and freedom. It is the masterwork of a writer of dazzling insight and verbal resource, and one of the outstanding landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.

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