It was Henry Green, author of the novels Living (1929) and Loving (1945), whom the novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern described as ‘the writer’s writer’s writer’. Today, Joyce Cary has a better claim to that title. Largely absent from bookshops and critical accounts of English fiction, Cary’s fifteen novels – notably the colonial tragicomedy Mister Johnson (1939) and the wartime triptych now reissued by Everyman’s Library – were once widely celebrated. Doris Lessing described his work as ‘fresh, funny, popping with life’; Iris Murdoch said that Cary was ‘a universal writer and a moralist in the best sense’; Elizabeth Bowen named him ‘one of the best of our novelists’. In October 1952, to mark the publication of his thirteenth novel, Prisoner of Grace, Cary appeared on the front cover of Time. Two years later, he became the seventh writer to be featured in the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction interview series, following the likes of E M Forster, François Mauriac, Alberto Moravia and Graham Greene.

That mid-century eminence was hard earned. By the time Cary published his first novel, the fair-to-middling Aissa Saved, in 1932, he was already forty-three. He had been a stretcher bearer for the Red Cross during the two Balkan Wars, a member of the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War and then a minor functionary of the British Empire in Nigeria. He had been not only a failed poet (under the name Arthur Cary) but a failed painter, too. At seventeen, he dropped out of Clifton College in Bristol to study art, first in Paris, then in Edinburgh. ‘I was myself in 1905 a devoted Impressionist,’ he recalled, ‘one of the “daubers”. I thought that Impressionism was the only great and true art.’

Cary’s experience as an artist is central to the triptych, usually referred to as the ‘art trilogy’ (as opposed to his later ‘political trilogy’, which began with Prisoner of Grace). Set in London and Dorset between the years 1880 and 1939 (the broad lifespan of Modernism in literature and visual