Although he was primarily a novelist, and one whose artistic stature will probably increase with time, Joyce Cary's occasional prose writings are of considerable interest. Several of his autobiographical and travel impressions--reminiscent at times of William Golding's essays in a similar vein--are delightful sketches that reveal an admirably practical man and an integrated personality. Yet by his own testimony, such integrity came only as the result of a long and hard apprenticeship to life and art: in his training, he had to find his own way to self-expression; as with most artists, his formal education was of little practical help with either his writing or his painting. Having had to work on his own from a relatively early age, whether as an inexperienced district officer administering a remote region of northern Nigeria or as a novelist attempting to encompass a vast social range in his fiction, Cary was...