Not Honour More — Joyce Cary

Not Honour More is the third novel in the second trilogy, or triptych to use Cary's preferred term. The first two are The Prisoner of Grace and Except the Lord, in that order. All are reissued in Faber Finds. The central character remains Chester Nimmo (based on Lloyd George) but this time he is seen from the point of view of Captain Jim Latter, Nina Nimmo's first love and second husband. In Prisoner of Grace Joyce Cary brilliantly recreated he great political events in the first years of the twentieth-century leading up to the Great War: in Not Honour More he no less brilliantly recreates the bewildering days of the General Strike of 1926. In his Reader's report, the literary critic, Walter Allen wrote, 'I think this is splendid. It rounds off the trilogy beautifully, and is as thoroughly unexpected as Except the Lord was. Moreover, by bringing in the third member of the triangle as spokesman it brings in too, in full force and voice as it were, a type of man the author had not presented nearly as fully anywhere in his work before. If Chester Nimmo is the God-intoxicated man, Jim Latter, who tells the story of this novel, may be regarded as his opposite: the man who has no use for inspiration or intuition but proceeds according to his sense of duty and justice, the archetype one might suppose of the soldier. He seems to me as brilliantly rendered, in the very tones of his speaking and syntax, as any personage Cary has presented in the first person. He is utterly convincing ...'