Fifth Business
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| Fifth Business | |
 Paperback edition of Fifth Business |
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| Author | Robertson Davies |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Sandra Dionisi |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Deptford Trilogy |
| Publisher | Penguin Group |
| Publication date | 1970 |
| Media type | paperback |
| Pages | 273 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-14-026049-8 (paperback edition) |
| Followed by | The Manticore |
Fifth Business is a 1970 novel by Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor Robertson Davies. It is the first installment of the Deptford Trilogy and is a story of the life of the narrator, Dunstan Ramsay. It is Davies' best-known novel,[1] and considered his finest.[2]
First published by Macmillan of Canada in 1970, Fifth Business was selected 40th on the American Modern Library's "reader's list" of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.[3]
Contents |
[edit] Plot
Ramsay's passion for hagiology and his guilty connection to Mary Dempster provide most of the impetus and background for this novel. He spends much of the book struggling with his image of Mary Dempster as a fool-saint and dealing with issues of guilt that spawned from a childhood accident.
The entire story is told in the form of a letter written by Ramsay on his retirement from teaching at Colborne College, addressed to the school Headmaster.
[edit] Themes
Davies discusses several themes in the novel, perhaps the most important being the difference between materialism and spirituality. Davies asserts religion is not necessarily integral to the idea—demonstrated by the corrupt Reverend Leadbeater who reduces the Bible to mere economic terms.
Davies, then being an avid student of Carl Jung's ideas, deploys them in Fifth Business. Characters are clear examples of Jungian archetypes and events demonstrate Jung's idea of synchronicity. The stone thrown at Ramsay when he was a child reappears decades later in a scandalous suicide or murder.
A genuinely learned man, Davies wrote a prose that both poked fun at pretentious scholarship and enjoyed joking allusions, as in the names of Ramsay's girl friends, Agnes Day, Gloria Mundy and Libby Doe. He explained these later as "Agnes, the Sufferer — a type well known to all men; Gloria, the Good Time Girl, and Libby, the energetic go-getter" (letter 11 March, 1982, in For Your Eyes Alone: Letters 1976-1995, ed. Judith Skelton Grant, 1999.)
[edit] Origin of the title
The book's title was explained by the author as a theatrical term, a character essential to the action but not a principal, "called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style," quoting Tho. Overskou, Den Danske Skueplads. This is a real if obscure scholarly work in Danish, and the quotation was provided by Davies to satisfy the book's first publisher. Only in 1979, when the book's Norwegian translator failed to find the citation did Davies admit it was his invention.
[edit] Comparison of the novel with Davies life
Ramsay's life (wounded war veteran, lifelong bachelor schoolmaster) was wholly unlike Davies' (never in the army, married with a family, a newspaper editor and author) yet some readers thought Fifth Business semi-autobiographic. Davies projects his life experiences (childhood in a small Ontario town, family connections with the social and financial elite) into many of his works and it seems no surprise Davies thought of it as "autobiographical, but not as young men do it; it will be rather as Dickens wrote David Copperfield, a fictional reworking of some things experienced and much re-arranged." Davies allows us to peer through a window into his childhood in Thamesville, Ontario and through his young life into higher education and beyond through the character of Ramsay and throughout the Deptford trilogy. Davies provides us, in Fifth Business, with an autobiography which is "not a sweating account of the first time he backed a girl into a corner", but an account of his spirit, his memories, and his deeper life experiences.
[edit] Principal characters in Fifth Business
- Dunstan Ramsay — The narrator of the novel. Born at the turn of the 20th century, he is maimed in WWI, wins a Victoria Cross, and devotes his life to the study of saints and myths.
- Boy Staunton — Ramsay's childhood friend who threw a snowball at him which instead hit Mary Dempster, thereby precipitating the premature birth of Paul Dempster and her subsequent slide into madness. Through his immense business skills he becomes a billionaire in the sugar-processing business in Canada. He has almost no insight into himself but is a charming man with an immense need for sexual gratification.
- Mary Dempster — Ten years older than the narrator, Dunstan Ramsay, she plays a pivotal role in his life where she assumes saint-like proportions despite being held in an insane asylum.
- Paul Dempster — Son of Mary Dempster. Ten years younger than Dunstan Ramsay, he outshines Ramsay at hand magic and later on, disappears with a travelling circus. Later in life he transforms himself into the magician Magnus Eisengrim and is the subject of World of Wonders.
- Leola Staunton — Ravishing wife of Boy Staunton and first love of Dunstan Ramsay. A sometimes weak, sometimes strong woman who cannot live up to her ambitious husband's expectations.
- Lieselotte Vitzliputzli — Daughter of a millionaire Swiss watchmaker who assists Magnus Eisengrim in his travelling magic show. She is bisexual, and the victim of an early adolescent affliction (never specified but possibly acromegaly) which leaves her unsually tall and with large features. She is Ramsay's confessor and lover and critic and completes him as a man.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Fifth Business publication history at the Internet Book List
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