An American Visitor - Tapa blanda

“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.

Joyce Cary was born in 1888 into an old Anglo-Irish family and educated at Clifton. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris, before going up to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1909 to read law. On coming down he served as a Red Cross orderly in the Balkan War of 1912-13, the inspiration for Memoir of the Bobotes, before joining the Nigerian Political Service.

He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, was wounded while fighting in the Cameroons, and returned to civil duty in Nigeria in 1917 as a district officer. His time in Africa provided the inspiration for his first four novels. Though he settled in Oxford as a full-time writer in 1920, it was not until 1932 that his first book was published. At the time of his death in 1957, he was recognised as one of the leading novelists in the world.

Cary is probably best known as a novelist and especially for Mister Johnson and ‘The First Triptych’ (Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and The Horse’s Mouth) in which the three main protagonists narrate their interlocking experiences and reveal their contrasting personalities. However he was also a fine short story writer, essayist and poet.