Joyce Cary is one of those rare people who was fully in the world before he became a writer. Cary’s world was not just Ireland (he was born into an Anglo-Irish family in Londonderry), or England, where he studied, or even Paris where he tried to become an artist, but West Africa. He knew Africa in war and peace. He abandoned the notion of being a painter but it could be said that Africa made him a writer – his first four books had African backgrounds and even central characters – Mr Johnson the eponymous hero of the novel is a Nigerian, boldly drawn.

A political officer in Nigeria, Cary joined a Nigerian regiment, and fought in the First World War in the Cameroons, where he was badly wounded. He was invalided out to England, but returned to Nigeria and did not leave for good until 1920. He settled in Oxford, wrote short stories and ultimately published his first novel, Aissa Saved in 1932. He was then 44 and you could say that he had served a long apprenticeship. Many novels were to follow, among them the trilogy that he is best known for, that includes Herself Surprised, To Be A Pilgrim and The Horses’s Mouth.

As an aspiring writer, living in Central Africa a few years after Cary died in 1957, I was drawn to his story. I was also living in the bush; my students were African, political independence was imminent. A humane and rational man, Cary saw Africa clearly and indeed one of his most powerful works is a booklet – The Case for African Freedom, published in 1941, at a time when very few people in Europe or America were thinking about African freedom.

Now it sounds as though I am making Cary into an image of Pan African piety. I merely want to show how I first came to his work. Of course, Mr Johnson was the sort of book I hoped to write myself – I knew any number of Mr Johnsons in Nyasaland, which was later to become Malawi. When I read The Horse’s Mouth I was astonished by the full-bloodedness of it, the ingenuity, the imagination, this portrait of a rebellious artist and the London art world. The language, the whole structure of the book – its sweep, its humanity – showed me what was possible in the novel: something new, modern, even experimental without any pretension. And it was funny – Gulley Jimson is one of the English novel’s greatest figures, beautifully depicted. (And by the way, reading about him is a way of understanding artists as diverse as Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon.)

From that joyous experience of reading The Horse’s Mouth I went back and read the whole trilogy, beginning with Herself Surprised, and I went on reading him – as I still do, rereading. I saw what a deliberate craftsman Cary was: he knew exactly what he was doing, and he was ambitious in his creations. His writing dazzles with the unexpected, and yet there is always an exactness to it, and something true and lasting.

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