Leading us all a dance

Spectator, The, May 31, 2003 by Gardam, Jane

Then suddenly he would take off to foreign parts. He taught for a year on the Great Plains of North America in a hick town where he was hungry and poor and long remembered. The Battle of Pollocks Crossing, which he thought his best book, he spent the rest of his life writing.

But as wonderful is A Season in Sinjii, about his war service on the coast of West Africa flying the rickety old Lysander flying boats, while on the ground the soldiers went mad with heat and sickness, ended up howling at the moon, falling in love with monkeys, sometimes encountering heroism, love, pity. Carr married happily and his son still runs the press in Kettering. Though Sally Carr disliked hawking her husband's maps around the bookshops she lived with him contentedly for 36 years. For him she was the end of the search. Her eight-year fight with cancer they kept private. She never appears in the novels.

Carr's son is not sycophantic. 'All right, Dad wrote novels, but that doesn't make him exceptional . . .' The rest of his life was in the novels. His wife and I are not.' Hoping for a loving word as Carr died, his son suggested to his father that it was a pity he had never been a 'more intimate man'. Carr replied, 'No. I'm not.'

As reminiscences of Carr, and for lovers of his books, this biography perhaps couldn't be bettered. As an assessment of Carr's importance as novelist and satirist of the teaching of the false romanticism of Eng. Litz., and of his fury against cruelty and bureaucracy, there is much more to be said. But Rogers has made clear that there is more than one Carr: 'The Card', the rum fellow who wrote books, the English eccentric. There is something of granite, the same dogged unconcern for his critics as Cobbett showed, or even Blake.