Book Review: The Horse's Mouth is an English Don Quixote, a picaresque story portraying an artist errant, a delusional painter tilting at the world of art, caste, and blank walls. As if the Man of La Mancha was a Dylan Thomas who painted instead of wrote, a man who never quite grew up ("as he's got older, he's got younger"), self-destructive and choosing the worst thing for himself when better options are available. A man at war with a world that is not at war with him. He's not lovable, but understandable, a man who has given up everything for his art, his craft, his dream, and does so without scruples or (much) regret. Just as addicts will do anything to feed their habit, so 67-year-old Gulley Jimson will do anything to feed his addiction to art, do anything to buy brushes and paints and (since he's a muralist at heart) find an empty wall. Jimson is not a nice person, not someone you'd want in your home, and the novel wants the reader to see that but forgive him because he does it all for art. Jimson can't fully see people as people, as real, because he sees all the world as a work of art, as the subject of one of his pictures, as though he himself created all the world as a painting. The irony being that for all Jimson is in his own mind and the minds of many around him a great artist, the novel implies that he painted only one truly great picture, that of his wife in the bath. The Horse's Mouth is the third book in a trilogy (the "First Trilogy") by Joyce Cary (1888-1957), after Herself Surprised (1941) focusing on and told by the character Sara Monday, and To Be a Pilgrim (1942) centered on Tom Wilcher, both of whom appear in this volume. Neither of which I've yet read so will end up reading them out of order. The Horse's Mouth is a close cousin to The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy, and both being ancestors of Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me, the three books being published in '44, '55, and '66 respectively. Most of all this is a book to be read slowly, savored, reflected upon, to be read without (my) impatience. It's a book that would be worthwhile to take a month to read. Sure, it's picaresque, episodic, not much happens, but much is contemplated and observed. Cary employs stream of consciousness, meditations, digressions, memories, discussions, and pronouncements amidst the intricate embroidery of the descriptions of the world around Jimson, descriptions as if of a painting, the whole world as simply a painting, two dimensional. Thoughtful and ruminative on philosophy, art, religion, economics, dense with meaning, at times almost Joycean (James not Cary) in its narration and observations. "Art and religion and drink. All of them ruin to a poor lad." Most of all Joyce Cary looks at humanity. Just as Gulley Jimson wants to paint what's real and revealing, so Cary wants to write real people, homely women and weak men, defeated and desperate, fearing what the world has on offer. Many pages are spent contrasting the sensitivities of a world of haves and have-nots. "It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar." The story simultaneously glories in the life of the artist and despairs at the cost. My one caveat, and I accept all blame (I'm an impatient reader and certainly it's just me), is that at about two-thirds through the book it just seemed too long, that the wandering, picaresque tale had gotten lost, the new episodes were no longer adding to the story. Closer to the end, however, The Horse's Mouth most definitely got back on track and fully regained the coursing flow and power of the great book it is. [4½★]
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