But the cabal of characters here and in Fifth Business’s sequels is anything other than usual. “He was killed by the usual cabal,” it says. At the end of Fifth Business, a clue is offered by a Brazen Head, which floats above a stage. Tied to this is the question of the peculiar death of a man named Boy Staunton. There is the question of whether the woman struck in the head by the snowball may or may not be, afterward and as a consequence, a saint capable of raising the dead and other miracles. Book after book, Davies alchemically transmutes peevishness and spite (qualities that seem, time and again, to be literally a base note of each of his narrators’ construction) into joy and escape and delight.Īt the heart of the Deptford Trilogy is a set of mysteries. Fifth Business is a chatty, profound, and slippery novel that starts in a small town in rural Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century and, over the course of it and the subsequent two books, takes its characters and readers on a sort of pilgrim’s picaresque. And so the book begins in the double vein of the tragic and the comic, only to unfold-so expansively that its construction feels like a kind of magic trick of its own-into a series of encounters with marvels and miracles and mysteries and Mysteries, too. The first novel, Fifth Business, begins out of pique-retiring schoolmaster and moderately successful hagiographer Dunstan Ramsay will give an account of his life as a rebuttal to the impression left by a condescending write-up of his career in a college newsletter. It is the story of a small act of malice (a boy throws a snowball that contains a rock) and the remarkable consequences of that act, as we follow the ripples outward. An introduction is surely a more efficient system of recommendation, and it does seem, this the last decade or so, that I have more friends who love novels who have never read Davies.Īnd so, friends and readers, here is my pitch to you as to why you should pick up Fifth Business and its sequels.

Then, too, I have always kept a spare copy of either Fifth Business or World of Wonders to press on to friends (as Fifth Business was once pressed on me). It was, in part, this realization that made me eager to write an introduction. A decade or so has somehow passed between the last time I sat down to read Fifth Business and the rest of the Deptford Trilogy and now. A reader lucky enough to live to a certain age must grow accustomed to the sensation of dislocation that is a symptom of realizing what a great swath of time has been eaten up since they picked up a favorite book.

The deptford trilogy robertson davies