Unsettling Futures - Issue #5: Robertson Davies, the Crotchety Sorcerer of CanLit
"A winter's night on a vivid street, which in time I recognized as a street I knew well from childhood. After a while the scene was peopled by two boys, and one was throwing a snowball, and I knew the snowball had a stone concealed in it." – Robertson Davies, describing the origin of Fifth Business
"Now, critics – I've known a lot of them personally, and they're extraordinarily touchy fellows." – Robertson Davies
The thing no one tells you about serious Canadian literature is how many fantasy and science fiction novels it conceals. Crack the covers of a Governor General's Award-nominated tome promising poverty, alienation, and adultery in Depression-era Saskatoon, and sooner or later you're reading about tarot cards, ghosts, and miraculous resurrection.
Some of this has been obvious for years – Margaret Atwood, writer of five science fiction novels and a re-telling of The Odyssey from Penelope's point of view (I really have to read that some day), has even softened on her "But I'm not one of those icky sci-fi writers!" stance in recent years. I maintain that Mordecai Richler's Solomon Gursky Was Here is one of the country's great epic fantasies; buy me a Coke in the After Times and I'll tell you why. And Marian Engel's Bear has become a kind of recurring Twitter joke in recent years due to its subject matter and lurid 1970s paperback cover.
But Robertson Davies is the author who makes me question the definition of fantasy itself.
Davies is a CanLit mainstay, and Fifth Business, his most popular and enduring work, has wormed its way into the high school curriculum in several places across the country. It contains not a single moment of magic that could not be explained away as coincidence or chance. Yet for me, it is one definition of fantasy.
Davies was an extremely odd figure, and his contradictions are what made him great.
On the one hand, he was purpose-built to be a figure of the mid-20th century Canadian establishment. White, male, Protestant, of Welsh and Scottish descent (English speaking Canada has always been actually English on the margins), he spent much of his life clad in tweedy waistcoats, heavily involved in the brick-built institutions of the so-called Laurentian Elite – schools, newspapers, foundations, churches. His father was a newspaper publisher and then Liberal senator, and remember that our senators are appointed, and back then, for life. Davies was also the kind of crotchety, judgmental older man who features in most of his later books, cranky and in some ways a small-c conservative by nature, suspicious of those dirty hippies, etc.
On the other hand, he was a trickster, a gossipy theatre kid who never grew up. He helped found the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and dashed off plays and ghost stories and satire along with scholarship. His first three novels are comic, about the entanglements and romances among the players in an amateur theatre company – he won the Stephen Leacock Award for one of them.
That was in the 1950s. And then, Davies didn't publish a novel for a dozen years, until 1970, and what he handed his publishers was an odd tome that mingles Davies' own life experiences with miracles, stage magic, and Jungian psychology. The man well into a distinguished middle age, encysted in the establishment, revealed an obsession with myth and magic, and the friction there made Fifth Business what it is.
The title, and how it became fixed to the book, tells you a lot about the two sides of Davies.
The term fifth business, in the book, is said to refer to characters in plays who are neither hero nor villain, who are not central to the action but who are vital in some way to the denouement. When pestered by his editors for more information about this term, which none of them had ever heard, he sent them a snippet from a scholarly Danish tome on theatrical history.
It was several years before they discovered he had made up the scholarly tome, the whole quote, and the entire term fifth business, too.
Fifth Business is an odd book, composed by the two sides of Davies working in tandem – it's in part a closely-observed portrait of early and mid-20th century Canada, particularly white small-town Ontario and then Toronto to the late 1960s. On the other hand, it's suffused with miracles, saints, portents, and people shedding their names to find new destinies.
Near the turn of the century, a boy throws a snowball with a stone buried in its centre. The target ducks, it strikes a pregnant parson's wife who goes into sudden labour. Sixty years later, the three surviving participants in that tableau meet again – Boy Staunton, millionaire, who threw the snowball, scholar Dunstan Ramsey, who ducked, and a magician, the child born prematurely in mid-winter.
In between those two points is Ramsey's life, the story of a man who was fifth business to the others – facilitating, cleaning up, teaching, bearing secrets, fighting his own battles and pursuing his own dreams but always drawn back to Boy Staunton and to the magician, who has cast off his birth name and become Magnus Eisengrim. Dunstan will become convinced that he has met a saint, been saved by miracles, that the earthy, ordinary world is capable of concealing wonders.
In the final confrontation, Dunstan reveals he still has the stone, has been carrying it around as a physical manifestation of his guilt and anger for six decades. Hours later, Boy will be dead, his expensive car driving off a Toronto pier into frigid Lake Ontario. In his mouth, the coroner will find a stone the size of an egg.
But Davies is not done.
At Eisengrim's next show after Boy's death, the main event is a "brazen head" that answers questions from the audience. Someone in the crowd shouts "Who killed Boy Staunton?"
And the head answers:
He was killed by the usual cabal: by himself, first of all; by the woman he knew; by the woman he did not know; by the man who granted his inmost wish; and by the inevitable fifth, who was the keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone.
It's not a prophecy, it's not magic, you can trace the route of all the information in the brazen head's answer to a mundane source. But what fantasy writer wouldn't give their eye teeth to write a pronouncement like that?
But how is Fifth Business in any way a fantasy? Where's the actual magic, the miracles, the trappings that would cause us to categorize it as fabulism/magic realism/slipstream/spec fic, much less as genre fantasy?
There aren't any. And obviously there's none of the more traditional markers of genre, no elves or vampires or faeries or magic swords or kids with wands and lightning bolt scars.
On the other hand, what is fantasy but a world in which you can touch the numinous and the wondrous?
Dunstan Ramsay believes he's touched it, that he's seen people saved by it, that it saved his own life on the battlefields of the First World War. If Fifth Business isn't a fantasy, it's a novel that is entirely about the same themes that run through fantasy.
What is it like to live in a world where magic is possible? Because that's where Dunstan Ramsey lives, whether anyone else in the book believes it or not.
The wondrous would weave through everything else Davies wrote, right up to his death in 1996, usually within the realm of reality, but sometimes not – Murther and Walking Spirits is narrated by a ghost, and begins with his murder. I have not read every single book by Davies – I'm an incompletist, not a completist – but I've been working my way through the Cornish Trilogy during the pandemic. His later books are more mixed in quality, but I'm still fond of them. With thematic elements from tarot and art forgery to genealogy to mystic medicine, there's a lot of weird stuff going on.
He's also a product of his place and time – there's some wildly stereotypical Roma characters in The Rebel Angels. Davies also isn't always the best when writing women, though he at least is aware that they have inner lives, unlike some writers twenty or thirty years his junior. And if you want a view of the world beyond that of white Christian Canada – or heck, beyond Southern Ontario – you'll have to look somewhere else.
Still, if you're interested in exploring the outer edges of what makes fantasy fantasy, I'd suggest it. Broad genres provide more room for everyone to stretch themselves, and if Fifth Business is a fantasy novel, or at the very least closely fantasy-adjacent, that can only be good for other writers out on the edges of the genre.
Next week, I'll be taking a break from Unsettling Futures, as I need to work on other projects. When I come back, I'm going to be writing about Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, specifically the Hugo and Nebula winning novella The Mountains of Mourning.