Novel
Fifth Business
Robertson Davies · 1970
Synopsis
Deptford, an Ontario village, 27 December 1908, shortly before six in the evening. Percy Boyd Staunton throws at Dunstable Ramsay, aged ten, a snowball in which he has hidden a stone. Ramsay ducks; the snowball hits Mary Dempster, the Baptist minister's wife, who is pregnant and gives birth to a son eighty days early and will never fully recover her wits. Ramsay will hold himself responsible. Having become a history teacher and a specialist in the lives of saints, he tells his life in a long letter to the headmaster of his college.
Context
The author was fifty-seven when this book appeared in 1970, in New York from Viking; praised by the New York Times, it won him readers outside his country. According to the book's epigraph, the title designates a role in lyric theatre: the one who is neither the hero, nor the heroine, nor the confidante, nor the villain, but without whom the plot cannot come to its conclusion. Two novels followed, The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975), centred respectively on Staunton's son and on the child born prematurely; together with this one they form the Deptford trilogy.
Who it is for
A novel written as a long memoir addressed to the headmaster of a school; hagiography, music hall and Jung's psychology all have their place in it.
Prizes and reception
It is the book that made its author known outside Canada; the Governor General's Award crowned its sequel.
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