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Books: Larger Than Life

3 minute read
TIME

THE CAPTIVE AND THE FREE (369 pp.) —Joyce Cary—Harper ($5).

If ever a novelist died heroically at his work, it was Britain’s Joyce Cary. For three years before he died at 68 in 1957, a rare, wasting nerve disease had gripped him in a relentlessly spreading paralysis. Toward the end he wrote with his arm sustained by a rope, his. pen tied to his hand. Then, when his limbs failed him entirely, he dictated until his lips could form no more words.

His last novel was The Captive and the Free. It is unmistakably incomplete, but unmistakably Cary. What he said in it, imperfectly through his pain, is that some people are larger than life and will not or cannot be bound by common constraints. These are the free; those who run with the herd are captives. And Cary also said that there is more than one road to God, though no road is easy.

Humbug or Healer? To his fine gallery of free men—Gully Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth, Chester Nimmo in Prisoner of Grace—Cary has added the Rev. Walter Preedy. In this hollow-chested, egotistical evangelist, the sense of God is like a torment. His specialty is faith healing. To him and to his followers in the London suburb of Pant’s Road, it is blasphemy to call a doctor, for that is an admission that God is incapable of miracles. Preedy seems to have worked quite a few miracles himself, and his fame is spreading. This in spite of the known fact that he has seduced a 14-year-old girl, got her pregnant, and allowed her baby to die rather than call a physician. Years later, he continues to force himself on the girl he seduced, for he believes that in sinning against Alice he found his way to God.

Ranged against him is the Rev. Mr. Syson of nearby St. Enoch’s. Syson is a World War II flying hero whose Anglican orthodoxy is correct and painless. Most of his parishioners agree with him that Preedy is a humbug, but Preedy’s miracles, performed in public, have convinced a few. Syson sets out to stop Preedy, and the matter comes to court. Not only does Syson fail, but he begins to re-examine his own faith. Like Gary himself, he does not deny God, but finds surer manifestations of him in the ordinary give and take of life than in established religion.

Miracle and Reward. In the meantime, Preedy flourishes when the spirit moves him, goes into decline when his mystical source fails him. Powerful newspaper people quarrel about him, try to decide whether to back him, attack him, or ignore him. The skeptical, hopelessly crippled daughter of an American millionaire is brought to him; the girl rises to her feet and rewards Preedy handsomely. But when Preedy persuades another woman to ignore doctors and her child dies, his own committee members begin to turn against him.

As it stands, The Captive and the Free is not one of ary’s best novels. But had the author been given the strength to do more work on it, the book might have been his most significant, for Cary knew that an offbeat life can sometimes distill significant truths. And in comparing the validity of conflicting approaches to God, Author Cary, before death ended his search, was perhaps looking for the most profound truth of all.

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