I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most Americans have never heard of Robertson Davies, novelist, essayist, playwright, actor, professor and publisher, who died in 1995. It’s a shame, really, because this old-fashioned Canadian has written some of the cleverest, most erudite-yet-accessible and tightly-plotted novels I’ve read.
His The Deptford Trilogy is made up of three novels: Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975). My paperback copy of this omnibus has 825 pages. The same cabal of characters inhabits all three novels although the focus of each separate novel is different. Fifth Business is told in first person and narrated by Dunstan Ramsay, a Canadian boy who grows up to be a schoolteacher and a world-renowned expert on saints. The Manticore is related as dialogue between David Staunton (son of Boy Staunton, a childhood and adult friend of Dunstan Ramsay) and his Swiss Jungian psychoanalyst. World of Wonders returns to Ramsay, technically as first-person narrator, who quotes the conversations and stories told to him by Magnus Eisengrim, a famous magician. The action that sets the three novels in motion is this: Ramsay, as a child, ducks a snowball thrown by Boy Staunton which hits Eisengrim’s pregnant mother, causing her to go into labor prematurely.
The Cornish Trilogy is comprised of The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred In the Bone (1985) and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) and the paperback comes in at an impressive 1,136 pages. As in the earlier trilogy, the same characters populate all three novels in varying degrees. The Rebel Angels takes place at a Canadian University: an eccentric art collector, Francis Cornish, has died, naming three of the professors as his executors. What’s Bred In the Bone leads us through Cornish’s very interesting life, from his childhood in a small town in Ontario, to his university education in Toronto (where his path crosses that of Dunstan Ramsay), to his apprenticeship as a painter and restorer, his war experiences and his return home to Canada. In The Lyre of Orpheus , the executors of Cornish’s will have established a charitable foundation which is sponsoring the completion of an unfinished opera by a doctoral candidate prodigy.
Article comments
1 - Linda Ecker
I too recently discovered Robertson Davies having never heard of him. I came across the Deptford Trilogy on the used book stand at my local library and was curious. I am now near the end of The Manticore and am utterly enchanted. I agree he's the most erudite (and skillful)modern novelist I may have ever come across! I am amazed he is not better known in this century.
2 - Stacy
My brother introduced me to the Cornish Trilogy when I was a junior in college. I fell in love immediately, and have read each trilogy (including The Salteron) several times. The Deptford Trilogy is a little problematic for me, though, as it contains potentially the best single book Davies ever wrote (Fifth Business) as well as the worst (The Manticore). Once "The Manticore" is struggled through, though, "World of Wonders" feels like a light breeze of fresh carnival air. My favorites remain Cornish and Salterton, though. Thanks for shining a little light on Davies -- apparently he's required reading for Canadian high-schoolers (although that's a bit of a dubious compliment), but it's a shame more Americans don't know him.