Castle Corner — Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary was nothing if not an ambitious novelist. In his prefatory essay he tells us 'Castle Corner was to have been the beginning of a vast work in three or four volumes showing not only the lives of all the characters in the first volume, but the revolutions of history during the period 1880-1935'. This particular 'vast work' was abandoned - he subsequently wrote two trilogies or triptychs, as he preferred to call them - but what is left, Castle Corner, is completely satisfying in itself, indeed, it contains some of his very best writing, especially in the Irish sequences in which Cary fictionalized some of his own family history. His biographer, Alan Bishop, refers to these sequences as being 'composed with patent zest. Characterization, especially of John Chass and Mary Corner; descriptive passages; incidents like the tandem race - all are magnificently realized . . . Undoubtedly the Irish chapters of Castle Corner contain some of his very best writing, by turns frenetic, ecstatic, meditative, poignant'. 'Mr Cary's book is stupendous . . . There is an intellectual richness . . . pages of allusive anecdote, chat, picture, narrative, family history, and a grim display of human squalor and inconsequence. It is a grand effect; and the book has a fury of incontrovertible detail.' Frank Swinnerton, Observer