Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyce Cary's remarkable First Trilogy, introduces Sara Monday, a woman at once dissolute and devout, passionate and sly. With no regrets, Sara reviews her changing fortunes, remembering the drudgery of domestic servitude, the pleasures of playing the great lady in a small provincial town, and the splendors and miseries of life as the model, muse, and mistress of the painter Gulley Jimson.
The Horse's Mouth, the third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, is perhaps the finest novel ever written about an artist. Its painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he a great artist? a has-been? or an exhausted, drunken ne'er-do-well? He is without doubt a visionary, and as he criss-crosses London in search of money and inspiration the world as seen though his eyes appears with a newly outrageous and terrible beauty.
Tabitha Baskett is seduced by an engaging scoundrel named Bonser who deserts her when she is pregnant. She is taken under the wing of a businessman who is also a patron of the arts; and after his death, by a millionaire. Finally she returns to Bonser who marries her. In charting the life of Tabitha, Cary has written one of the most enchantingly comic and life-enhancing stories of modern fiction and a vivid history of the first half of the twentieth century.
The adventures and misadventures of a young Nigerian negro in the British colonial civil service. A temporary clerk, still on probation, Mr Johnson has been in Fada, Nigeria, for six months and is already much in debt. Undaunted, he entertains on the grandest scale, with drums and smuggled gin. Not only that, he intends to pay a small fortune for his wife...
The power of mass persuasion, like all power, is a dangerous weapon. The Rev. Walter Preedy, faith healer, has this power, and Hooper, ruthless journalist on the Morning Argus, is determined that nothing is going to stop him getting the full Preedy story. Caught between the maniacal religious manipulation of Preedy and the equally invidious news-hounding of Hooper is Alice Rodker, seduced by Preedy as a child and now threatening to denounce him. Lady Rideout, the newspaper magnate, needs Preedy not only to swell sales of her newspaper but also, she believes, to save her life. Cary's last novel examines the ability to make people believe, whether through bogus religious fervour or sensational mass-media, and shows that both have a great potential for evil.
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