The Horse's Mouth - Tapa blanda

“The richest comic novel of the last ten years.”
V S Pritchett

“Mr Joyce Cary is an important and exciting writer... if you like rich writing full of gusto and accurate original character drawing, you will get it from The Horse’s Mouth”
John Betjeman

“The coming to perfect ripeness of a rare and blessed talent; and I recommend it out of a profound personal appreciation and joy.”
Pamela Hansford Johnson

“The Horse’s Mouth has the kick of ten stallions. Mr Joyce Cary writes at top pace, at the top of his voice, and the top of his form.”
The Observer

“Mr Joyce Cary is a most exciting novelist. There is a thrill in his books which comes from his own extraordinary vision of men and women, he writes so well, with such a fine understanding that at the end the reader feels there is nothing left to be said about the person, nothing left that one wants to know... the book is real and true. It flows over with life.”
Daily Telegraph

The Horse’s Mouth, famously filmed with Alec Guinness in the central role, is a portrait of an artistic temperament. Its principal character, Gulley Jimson, is an impoverished painter who bothers little about conventional values. His unquestioning certainty that he must live and paint according to his intuition without regard for the cost to himself or others makes him a man of great, if sometimes flawed, vision.

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 fulltime 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 Tryptych’ (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.