The Horse’s Mouth, the third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Cary) First Trilogy, is one of the finest novels ever written about an artist. Its painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he a great artist? A has-been? Or an exhausted, drunken ne’er-do-well? He is without doubt a visionary, and as he criss-crosses London in search of money and inspiration the world as seen though his eyes appears with a newly outrageous and terrible beauty.
First published 1944
298 pages in Faber & Faber paperback edition
ISBN 978-0571252008
Joyce Cary