Vote for Victoria

TO BE A PILGRIM (343 pp.)--Joyce Cary--Harper ($3).

Tom Wilcher was one of those choice eccentrics who, if English novelists are to be believed, still wander about the English countryside. He was a tough-minded conservative. He believed in God. He despised what seemed to him the shilly-shallowness of the between-wars younger generation and stoutly affirmed that the days of his youth, well before World War I, were the best a man could be born to.

When his niece Ann, a painfully plain woman doctor, bundled him off to the family's abandoned country house, old Tom feared that it was not so much out of affection for him as out of an interest in how he'd leave his money. But he settled down to enjoy the countryside he had known as a young fellow, and to watch with a critical eye the love affair and marriage of Ann and his nephew Robert.

Gaiety v. Wit. There is no earth-shaking action in the past & present story that Irish-born, English-educated Joyce Cary chooses to tell in To Be a Pilgrim (the fourth of his novels to be published in the U.S.), but Author Cary manages to convey one man's view of what has been happening to English life since Tom Wilcher's Victorian youth.

The love affair of Ann and Robert had mighty little spirit and even less romance old Tom Wilcher thought. After they were married, Robert returned to the fields phlegmatically modernizing the farm, and Ann calmly took up her chores, all as romantic as a baked potato. And naturally they drifted apart.

Tom let his mind spin back to livelier days. He remembered his devilish sister Lucy, who willfully eloped with Puggy Brown, the butcher; Lucy had scrubbed floors, suffered humiliation and yet found happiness in Puggy's gypsy crusade as leader of a revivalist sect. He remembered his own brilliant brother Edward, who rose to power as a Liberal politician and later came to a colorful, if disappointing, end. These people had made mistakes, thought Tom, but they had taken chances. They had been of the real England "whose nature was rather affection than passion; whose gaiety was rather humor than wit; whose judgment did not spring from logic but from sense."

Chaucer v. Black Hats. In a London hotel, watching the faces of those about him, Tom thinks: "When Chaucer wrote of pilgrimage . . . then every man knew where he was, and where he could go. But now all is confusion and no one has anywhere to go. They leave home only to sit under glass roofs, in black overcoats and black hats, with faces so private and cunning that you are afraid of them."

While not so lively or lightly spun as its predecessor, Herself Surprised (TIME, Sept. 20), To Be a Pilgrim has a vibrant life. Together, the two novels form part of a first-rate trilogy covering 20th-century English manners & morals in a half-serious, half-picaresque vein; the last and best of the three, The Horse's Mouth, has yet to be published in the U.S.

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