The three volumes of this series include Fifth Business (1970), mainly devoted to Dunstan Ramsay; The Manticore (1972), mainly devoted to Boy Staunton; and World of Wonders (1975), mainly devoted to Paul Dempsey in his professional guise as Magnus Eisengrim. The setting of the story is originally in the town of Deptford, Ontario, during the middle 20th century, although it moves on to other locations in different volumes as the main characters of each narrative grow and pursue adult lives.
This trilogy, and especially the first volume of it, is generally regarded as the best and most characteristic of Davies’s large creative output. The three protagonist characters live lives that are intertwined at various levels from childhood onward.
Fifth Business follows the life of Dunstan Ramsay, a kind of alter ego for Robertson Davies; Ramsay is recounting his autobiography from the perspective of old age. This first volume opens with an ordinary childhood act—the throwing of a snowball—that has tragic and long-reaching consequences. Ramsay, the intended target, ducks the fateful blow and thereby finds his character altered by the suffering inflicted on Mary Dempster and on the child, Paul Dempster, born prematurely after she is struck by the snowball. The snowball thrower, Boy Staunton, becomes an important political figure in Canada as an adult; his childhood snowball is so destructive because he has packed it with a stone. As an adult, Ramsay becomes a specialist in hagiology, the study of the lives of saints, perhaps as a compensation for the absence of genuine saintliness in his own life.
The Manticore provides an exploration of Jungian psychology, reviewing the numerous archetypes Carl Jung defined and applying them in the construction of the story. Boy Staunton’s son, David, is undergoing psychological therapy in Switzerland after an emotional breakdown; his progress into his problems, their sources, and his relationship with his father constitute the bulk of the novel. That paternal relationship is problematic in part because of Boy Staunton’s character in relation to his son, and in part because of his mysterious death: his body is recovered from Lake Ontario with the peculiarity of a stone in its mouth—another unexpected death associated with a stone.
World of Wonders is a fictional autobiography of Magnus Eisengrim, undertaken by Dunstan Ramsay. It features a strong emphasis on magic—Magnus Eisengrim is a gifted magician—but the story draws on the concepts of appearance and reality rather than on the recent conventions of magic realism. Davies emphasizes the ways human beings are isolated from the knowledge of the risks they face by acting in the world—in the endless and endlessly interconnected chain of causes and effects—while they are simultaneously condemned to continue acting (with a play of words on “acting,” since all the world’s a stage and Davies began his career as a professional actor). The snowball incident is seen from yet another perspective, since it was that event that brought about the special giftedness of Paul Dempster.
The three novels display the author’s erudition: he was a scholar and a man of letters as well as a novelist, dramatist, essayist, and journalist. Davies demonstrates the psychological depth of his thinking in his use of oppositions such as appearance and reality; his linguistic skill is apparent in his clever wordplay. Characters developed in this series later appear in other works by Davies, and the well-prepared reader encounters them as old friends. Although Robertson Davies writes at a level of literary sophistication that is most fully appreciated by deeply educated and experienced readers, his absorbing plots and fully rendered characters also appeal to readers mainly interested in a good story.
Bibliography
Lawrence, Robert G., and Samuel L. Macey, eds. Studies in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. English Literary Studies. Victoria, British Columbia: University of Victoria, 1980.
Monk, Patricia. Mud and Magic Shows: Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. Canadian Fiction Studies 13. Toronto: ECW, 1992.
———. The Smaller Infinity: The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
Moss, John. Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel: The Ancestral Present. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977.
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