Tom Wilcher is a miserly lawyer, deeply at odds with the modern world.
At the time of his death in 1957, he was recognised as one of the leading novelists in the world..
Though he settled in Oxford as a full-time writer in 1920, it was not until 1932 that his first book was published.
He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, and his time in Africa provided the inspiration for his first four novels.
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 studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris, before going up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1909 to read law. along the lines of Brideshead Revisited - The Modern Novel \'Its excellence lies in the great skill with which a character is drawn in all its variety, in the minor portraits of members of his family with their subsidiary stories and in the unhesitating and illuminating detail of half a century of English life\' - The Observer Joyce Cary was born in the north of Ireland in 1888 into an Anglo-Irish family.
It is also a book about how England has changed over the years ...
Tom is superbly drawn by Cary and there is a rich cast of characters, each one distinct in her/his own way.
Praise for To Be a Pilgrim: \'I thought that this was a really fine book ...
It is the work of a writer of dazzling insight and verbal resource, and among the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.
In the end, the trilogy offers a sweeping vision, at once funny and sad, sympathetic and satirical, of humanity in all its fallen and free glory.
But when read together the three books, with their three strikingly different narrators, afford new and startling perspectives on each other.
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 as he faces death his spiritual yearnings are uppermost in his mind.
Tom Wilcher, the hero of the second volume of Joyce Cary\'s First Trilogy, has been at various times a political activist, a tight-fisted lawyer, a self-sacrificing brother and a dirty old man.
Approaching death, amidst a close-knit family that he both resents and loves, he reviews his life and times.
Tom Wilcher is a miserly lawyer, deeply at odds with the modern world
