Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

Second reading; first read about 15 years ago

Book 1 of the Deptford Trilogy.

Canadian writer Robertson Davies was a wonder. His writing is surpassingly elegant and subtle. His flashes of humor are understated and never mean or bitter. He displays great intellect and scholarship without appearing pretentious. His plots are interesting, often convoluted, and suspenseful. His characters are fully realized and seem to be real people, people we might know. And his stories always include deeper layers, with considerations of such weighty issues as religious belief and mythology and Jungian psychological theory. Many consider this novel his best.

The narrator here is Dunstan Ramsay, writing a letter to his former Headmaster after retirement. He begins with an incident from his childhood in Deptford, Canada, that influenced the rest of his life: the throwing of a snowball meant for him by Percy Boyd Staunton, which permanently injured a local minister's wife instead. He concludes the story with a revelation about the identity of the murderer of Percy Boyd (now known as Boy) Staunton. In between comes an account of the lives of Ramsay and Staunton, as well as the life of Leora, who loved them both after a fashion, and of the lives of the minster's wife and of her troubled son.

All of this would be very interesting if written about only from a plot perspective, but author Davies reveals the "why" of what happens in a masterful demonstration of dramatic irony, so that the reader understands what the narrator unconsciously reveals even when he does not understand it himself.

Davies is well known and honored in Canada, but somewhat overlooked in the U.S., and I cannot imagine why. I believe he equals, and often surpasses, the best that we can offer in the way of 20th Century writers.