Up from Poverty

EXCEPT THE LORD (276 pp.)--Joyce Cary--Harper ($3.50).

One test of a good fictional character is whether he leads a double life in 1) the writer's imagination, 2) the reader's memory. Joyce Gary, who has created some of the most memorable characters in 20th century fiction, has frequently passed this test with lovable scamps, e.g., Gulley Jimson (The Horse's Mouth), Sara Monday (Herself Surprised). Chester Nimmo, who made his debut in Gary's last novel, Prisoner of Grace (TIME, Oct. 20, 1952), is no scamp but a fireballing politico who marries into money, gets elected to Parliament, enters the Cabinet and finally becomes Lord Nimmo, without ever losing his missionary zeal or his sense of political destiny. Except the Lord,* which takes Chester Nimmo back in point of time to his mid-Victorian boyhood and young manhood, asks, retrospectively, one central question: What made Nimmo run?

The Nimmos are a farm family, bitterly poor and sternly religious. They are also a game clan. Knocked down in one round of human experience, they are eagerly up at the bell for another. Most of the time in Except the Lord, young Chester is busy picking himself up off the floor.

He is floored by the poverty that haunts his father with the workhouse, wrecks his mother's and sister's health and prematurely kills both, and sweeps the Nimmos into humiliating dependence on neighbors. He is floored by his preacher-father's Puritan code and his mathematical proofs of the imminent second coming of Christ. He is floored by his elder sister's erratic half-fond, half-bullying rule over him when their mother dies.

By the maxims of contemporary popular psychology, this kind of childhood should lay a maze of neuroses for little Chester, and keep him confused, embittered and forever shying at life's challenges. That it fills him instead with great expectations and the drive to make them come true is a sign of the soundness and not the weakness of Author Gary's insight.

Chester catches sight of his destiny in adolescent flashes of intuition. Standing in a tent show before a penny-dreadful melodrama, he feels the actor's hypnotic hold on the crowd, senses that his words too may one day sway and spellbind. Standing, on another day, atop a rain-drenched knoll with his Adventist father and nine of the faithful awaiting the second coming of Christ, he feels his faith oozing away. He turns to the prophets of social revolution, soaks up the teachings of Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin. and becomes a labor organizer. But a violent and bitter strike convinces him that his new gods are false. At novel's end, Chester Nimmo, over 21, is clean of illusions", and ready for whatever further adventures life and Author Gary have in store for him. That there will be more seems likely, for Chester Nimmo has captured the next best thing to Joyce Gary's comic genius, his endless curiosity.

*"Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." (Psalms 127: 1.)

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