Deptford Trilogy #1

Note: The book reviewed below is the first book in a trilogy whose theme is getting out from under bad feelings caused by a traumatic incident in childhood (this one), by an ordinarily rocky childhood with troubled parents (the second one), and by a childhood scarred by social, economic, and sexual abuse (the last one).  I read the second book The Manticore in the trilogy first, then the last book World of Wonders second. Other than fate putting them on the tables at used book sales in that order, who knows how these things happen? Lucky the trilogy doesn’t have to be read in order.

Fifth Business – Robertson Davies

This novel is narrated by its star character Dunstan Ramsay. Ramsay is a man of many achievements—he is a war hero, a teacher, a scholar and an author of academic tomes and popular books for travelers, His subject is Catholic saints. So Ramsay is ticked about a news article about his retirement from the boy’s school where he taught for 45 years. He detects a patronizing and dismissive tone and calls the writer of the piece an “ineffable jackass.” This novel is his long letter to the school’s Headmaster supporting the claim that in fact he is not a doddering Mr. Chips stumbling toward years of mental deterioration.

The reader can tell Davies was a journalist who wrote to be understood by a diverse readership. The narrative possesses an easy rhythm which allows pleasant reading. Some scenes have a terrible and overwhelming dynamism, while there are also occasional episodes of unexpected hilarity. Many character sketches -- mean religious Amasa Dempster; Milo Papple, class clown and town barber; Joel Surgeoner, tramp and mission director; Diana Marfleet, devoted nurse -- through brief and accurate brushstrokes, are expressive and real, calling mind E.M. Forster's dab hand with secondary characters like Charles Wilcox. The main characters – Ramsay, his frenemy Boy Staunton, his saint Mary Dempster - are anything but plain cardboard.

The episodes are presented in set pieces, with background given in an essay-like style and depth. For instance, Ramsay’s WWI experience doubles as the no-frills account of his winning the Victoria Cross and a general reportage of the miseries of trench warfare. The organization is always clear, making the novel easy to read, to put down and pick up and recall readily what is going on.

Another attraction – or not so much, depending on the reader - is that Davies, as is typical of him, has a certain approach to moral improvement.  Ramsay when young had a strict mother and no-nonsense Presbyterian education. So he grew to adulthood on the razor’s edge. That is, he has to balance virtues like discretion and loyalty with the burden of guilt, concessions to respectability or that constant bugbear of our species, envy.

Ramsay's emotional life is an ordinary life similar to our own, especially we men who are reluctant to disclose our thoughts and feelings and thus never get a chance to have our goofy ideas disputed by other people, who are just as smart as we are and living a life as vivid as our own. Introspective reticent men like Ramsay could avoid a lot of guilt and shame if they judiciously aired out skeletons in the closet to intelligent and sympathetic others. Unable to forge connections with other people, Ramsay learns that he too can play an important role in the lives of others, as a catalyst for action (fifth business) even if he sometimes feels like an extra, on the bench until needed in extraordinary circumstances.

Like The Razor’sEdge, this is a novel for seekers. First published in 1970, Fifth Business is very much in keeping with the ideals of self-discovery and mystic searching of the 1960s. I have no idea if Davies is much read nowadays, even in his native Canada, since in his lifetime (he died in 1995 at 82) he’s vulnerable on elitist front due to quotations like “I think that civilization—life—has a different place for the intelligent people who try to pull us a little further out of the primal ooze than it has for the boobs who just trot along behind, dragging on the wheels.”