Pritchett on Cary's Irish irony

V.S. Pritchett, from his 1981 (?) introduction to the Time Reading Program Special Edition of Mister Johnson:

"One of the great contributions of the Irish to our enlightenment is their tenderness for rogues.  It enlivens all the Irish novels from Lever to Beckett.  It runs through the novels of the Anglo-Irish Joyce Cary.  And in the best of Cary's novels, Mister Johnson, it attains those heights at which the rogue turns into the poet and takes on a sort of sublimity.  A novel which is as breathlessly comic and endlessly ingenious as anything Cary ever wrote ends by making us weep and look at Africa with new eyes.  Or so it did when it was first published shortly after World War II.  The question is, after all that has happened to Africa since then, do we still feel the same about Clerk Johnson? [...] Is he a white colonial fancy -- "the natives are children" -- or has he more solid roots?

"Cary was not a boring talker.  He did not inform.  He did not lose himself in anecdotes.  His talk created an alternative world.  It was a form of life for the moment -- light, but serious.  This seriousness has its bearing on Mister Johnson and on all his novels.  He had lived a serious life.  Cary represented the dutiful strain in the Anglo-Irish character: low church Protestantism, intellectuality, social responsibility.  Before 1914, as a young man he had joined Sir Horace Plunkett's co-operative movement to raise the standards of Irish agriculture.  Afterward he turned to painting.

The man who eventually went out to Nigeria as an official was an artist at heart.  He not only brought with him the artist's insights into the minds of native peoples, but -- with Ireland's history and irony behind him -- he perceived that the whites were just as much 'natives' as the Africans, with superstitions, tribal customs, fantasies and delinquencies matching the African's, item by item.

"To the young Nigerian, one can well imagine, Mister Johnson will seem out of date and a distortion, just as in the doctrinaire days of Sinn Fein the critics accused the authors of Reminiscences of an Irish R.M. of perpetuating the idea of the stage Irishman.

We must grant that Cary's novel is set in the peace of 40 years ago and that, even for that time, the scene is placed in a remote and even derelict part of the country. [...]

But Cary did not set out to write an historical or problem novel.  He had his own mania: timelessness."  (xi-xv)