Tom Wilcher is a miserly lawyer, deeply at odds with the modern world. Approaching death, amidst a close-knit family that he both resents and loves, he reviews his life and times.
Tom Wilcher, the hero of the second volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, has been at various times a political activist, a tight-fisted lawyer, a self-sacrificing brother and a dirty old man. But as he faces death his spiritual yearnings are uppermost in his mind.
Each volume of Cary's trilogy, which begins with Herself Surprised and continues in The Horse's Mouth, brings a single character to intense and memorable life and can be read entirely on its own. But when read together the three books, with their three strikingly different narrators, afford new and startling perspectives on each other.
In the end, the trilogy offers a sweeping vision, at once funny and sad, sympathetic and satirical, of humanity in all its fallen and free glory. It is the work of a writer of dazzling insight and verbal resource, and among the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.
Praise for To Be a Pilgrim:'I thought that this was a really fine book ... Tom is superbly drawn by Cary and there is a rich cast of characters, each one distinct in her/his own way. It is also a book about how England has changed over the years ... along the lines of Brideshead Revisited - The Modern Novel
'Its excellence lies in the great skill with which a character is drawn in all its variety, in the minor portraits of members of his family with their subsidiary stories and in the unhesitating and illuminating detail of half a century of English life' - The Observer
Joyce Cary was born in the north of Ireland in 1888 into an Anglo-Irish family. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris, before going up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1909 to read law. On coming down he served as a Red Cross orderly in the Balkan War of 1912-13, the inspiration for Memoir of the Bobotes, before joining the Nigerian Political Service. He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, and his time in Africa provided the inspiration for his first four novels. Though he settled in Oxford as a full-time writer in 1920, it was not until 1932 that his first book was published. At the time of his death in 1957, he was recognised as one of the leading novelists in the world.