Prisoner of Grace — Joyce Cary

The Prisoner of Grace is the first novel in the second trilogy, or triptych to use Cary's preferred term. The other two are Except the Lord and Not Honour More in that order. All three are reissued in Faber Finds. The central character, Chester Nimmo, is based on Lloyd George. Appropriately, he is a spellbinder. In his Reader's report for the original publisher, Michael Joseph, the literary critic, Walter Allen considered the 'recreation of the very feel of political passions between 1900 and 1914' was 'brilliant' - 'the period, politically, is completely captured in all its intensity.' He ended by saying 'As a state of a politician in action it is quite superb; one feels at the end that here, almost for the first time, is the truth about the politician, the man for whom politics is a way of life in the same dedicated sense as for the artist art may be a way of life, or religion for a priest ... I think Prisoner of Grace is a great feat of imagination.'