Books: Cheerful Protestant

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The Chameleon. Britain's best contemporary critic, V. S. Pritchett, who likes more delicately flavored cups of tea than the ones Joyce Cary pours, nevertheless admits Gary's sturdy authenticity. Pritchett calls him "the chameleon among contemporary novelists. Put him down in any environment or any class, rich, middling or poor, English, Irish or foreign, and he changes color and becomes whatever his subject is, from an English cook to an African delinquent, from a ten-year-old Irish hoyden to an English army wife or an evangelical lawyer. The assimilation is quick, delectable, sometimes profound. Many novelists have a wide range of characters, but it is often merely a range of conscientious guesses; Mr.Cary goes further and becomes the person."

The person he becomes in his latest book, Prisoner of Grace, is a woman, Nina. A young orphan girl in a declining family in England of the 1890s, she is in love all her life with her cousin and childhood friend Jim Latter. When she is still in her teens, not yet mistress of her mind or her emotions, he gets her pregnant. To prevent scandal, her strong-minded guardian, Aunt Latter, marries her off to Chester Nimmo, a bright but poor local chap. Chester, twice Nina's age, is aware of her condition but considers the marriage a bargain. It means a tie-up with a family still socially important, and Nina's small fortune is a windfall. Chester is a Protestant evangelist, almost a mystic, and also burning with radical political ambitions.

Nina decides to make the best of it and be a good wife to Chester. As she watches him fight and connive his way to political power, she is disgusted, fascinated, finally enlisted. But she is still helplessly in love with Jim. Whenever that selfish, arrogant, incoherent gentleman reappears, he has only to crook his finger or whistle.

She bears Jim a second child—and Chester has little doubt who the father is. Nevertheless, Nina stays with Chester. He makes her feel that his religious faith and political destiny give him the greater claims on her loyalty. He reaches Parliament, enters the cabinet, finally becomes Lord Nimmo. Nina, through the years, is the target of his suspicions (well founded), the constant victim of his spite. But even when she hates him, which is not often, Chester's needy love for her keeps her in his debt, and makes it impossible for her to leave him. When Chester finally attains the top of the ladder, and she and Jim are middleaged, she gets a divorce and marries Jim at last. But now the shoe is on the other foot: old Nimmo, under the pretext of getting Nina's help with his memoirs, lays siege to her and carries the fort again & again. Even with Jim in a simmer of jealousy, she can't turn Chester away. At novel's end all three are living precariously together.