“Joyce Cary?” said a friend recently when someone mentioned the author of Mister Johnson and The Horse’s Mouth. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in decades.”

Alas, the name of Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary (1888-1957) is one that many readers born after World War IImay never have heard at all. How, an admirer of Cary must wonder, can one explain this unfortunate obscurity? A large part of the reason for it may be that Cary’s sixteen novels aren’t easy to place on most current maps of modern English fiction. In many ways, indeed, Cary doesn’t seem especially modern. He wasn’t a technical revolutionary in the manner of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; nor did he write bluntly sardonic critiques of twentieth-century society, as did Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley; nor did he shock readers, à la D. H. Lawrence, with dark and dangerous visions of primitive carnality. On the contrary, in a time when British and American novelists alike were avidly experimenting with fresh literary modes and sympathetically exploring newly minted systems of values, Cary wrote novels that recall such pre-modern masters as Defoe and Smollett, Fielding and Sterne, Dickens and Thackeray, and created sympathetic characters whose moral positions can, to contemporary readers, sound awfully Victorian. Certainly many of his convictions fail to accord with the received ideas of today’s academy. For one thing, he was (in his own way) profoundly religious; for another, his opinions on Third World issues—he wrote several novels about Africa—would