Review by Edward Tanguay August 7, 1996

Davies is simply a master of the English language. The New York Times in a quote on the back of the book describes this story as ". . . driven by irresistible narrative force." I like that description. I can honestly say that after starting this book I never wanted to put it down and always wanted to pick it back up again after I did! It is a book of growth, with a tight plot that begins with a snowball that sets the whole story in motion until, decades later, that same snowball hits its final target--an unexpected revenge, and an awesome structure!

The control of Davies' writing reminds me of that of Hardy's. The sense of world that you get and the accompanying loss and longing that you feel after you have read the last page is poignant, as if you have just said goodbye to a friend who is now speeding off on a train. You want to get back into the story because, all of those people, Dunstan, Liesl, Paul, Boy, and Padre are real characters with whom you don't want to part. (It's comforting to know that Fifth Business is the first of a trilogy! I hope the other two can take me back to this universe that Davies has created and which seems so familiar now.)

Early in the book I began to notice that Dunny was having a number of incidents which were rites of passage to new sections of his life, or at least were signifcant steps in his growth. One of his first was his loss of his mother's authority over him, following the whipping incident in the kitchen:

I pondered these words before I went to sleep. How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had pursued me around the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged with--what? Vengeance? What was it? Once, when I was in my thirties and reading Freud for the first time, I thought I knew. I am not sure I know now. But what I knew then was that nobody--not even my mother--was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.

Growth step number two was after he formed a love for magic as it was performed in a faraway world only to be told by a local parson that it was the devil's work. This is another step of questioning authority, this time not of his mother, but of the local religious head:

All that dim but glittering vision I had formed of Paris, with Robert-Houdin doing marvels to delight grand people, had been dragged down by this Deptford parson, who knew nothing of such things and just hated whatever did not belong to life at the $550- a-year level.

(Interestingly enough here, notice the perfect father-hate, mother-love Freudian triangle that Dunny forms, not with his own parents, but with the Dempsters!)

As Dunny grows and begins to understand the world, notice how incidents happen which force him to change his world view to incorporate it. Step three was when he and the other men searching for Mrs. Dempster find her in the bush in a blatant sexual position with the tramp. How is Dunny to deal with this? He has to fit it into his understanding of the world of Deptford? Here, he analyzes this incident in light of his relationship with Mrs. Dempster:

Close as we grew, however, there was never any moment when I could have asked her about the tramp. I was trying to forget the spectacle, so horrible in my visions, of what I had seen when first I happened on them--those bare buttocks and four legs so strangely opposed. But I could never forget. It was my first encounter with a particular kind of reality, which my religion, my upbringing, and the callowly romantic cast of my mind had declared obscene. Therefore there was an aspect of Mary Dempster which was outside my ken; and, being young and unwilling to recognize that there was anything I did not, or could not know, I decided that this unknown aspect wmust be called madness.

This does not last long as Dunny begins to see Mrs. Dempster not as mad, but as a saint. His inherited world view given to him by the narrow confines of Deptford slowly breaks away as his own, strange, inner view of the world begins to form itself.

Davies just tells it like it is without having to prove anything to the reader. He doesn't have a system that he wants Dunstan to discover by the end of the book, but quite the opposite, he lets Dunstan's beliefs continually need reevaluation in order to understand some new aspect in his life or some new incident. I enjoyed this most in Dunstan's (or is it Davies') view of religion, in which he is refreshingly irreverent to the standard structures of religion yet does not see the world as a nonreligious place either. Here, he comments on his athiest friend Sam:

If he hoped to make an ahteist of me, this was where he went wrong; I knew a metaphor when I heard one, and I like metaphor better than reason. I have known many atheists since Sam, and they all fall down on metaphor.

Dunstan is a phenomenologist: he continues to take in phenomena as they occur and he applies metaphors to them in order to understand them. And if new phenomena occur which do not fit to the old metaphor, he (and this is what I like about Dunstan) throws out the metaphor and begins again. In this way, Dunstan is playful with life, and his growth as a character is beautiful and natural. But Dunstan is not as playful as the Jesuit Padre! Padre who was a master at it! Here, over 100 years old sitting in his death bed, saying good-bye to Dunstan, joking away, playing with those around him and with God and life itself:

"Good-bye," he cried cheerfully. "We shall probably not meet again, Ramezay. You are beginning to look a little shaky." "I have not yet found a God to teach me how to be old," I said. "Have you?" "Shhh, not so loud. The nuns must not know in what a spiritual state I am. Yes, yes, I have found Him, and He is the very best of company. Very calm, very quite, but gloriously alive: we DO, but he IS. Not in the least a proselytizer or a careerist, like his sons." And he went off into a fit of giggles. I left him soon after this, and as I looked back from the door for a last wave, he was laughing and pinching his big copper nose with the tiny chocolate tongs. "God go with you, St. Dunstan," he called.

Dunstan's next step of growth was his "rebirth" in the army. I remember he mentioned later that the army had "cooked him on one side but left the other side raw" so that he had grown to be a man in one sense, but still had another side of him to develop. Here is an example of the harshness he experienced in the war:

And of course I saw corpses, and grew used to their unimportant look, for a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object. Worse, I saw men who were not corpses but who would be soon and who longed for death.

Davies description of the war from the front lines was shockingly vivid. Had Davies been in the war? If not, this is quite a professional description a la Stephan Crane. Another example of his not relying on preconceptions comes from his experience in the army. As he read the New Testament a lot in the army, the other soldiers thought he was a "Holy Joe" until he got up at a comedy show and did a routine which included some pretty dirty stuff about the Majors and others:

What really astonished me was the surprise of the men that I could do such a thing. "Jesus, the old Deacon, eh--getting off that hot one about the Major, eh? Jesus, and that riddle about Cookie, eh? Jesus!" They could hardly conceive that anybody who read the Testament could be other than a Holy Joe--could have another, seemingly completely opposite side to his charcter. I cannot remember a time when I did not take it as understood that everybody has at least two, if not twenty-two, sides to him. Their astonishment was what astonished ME. Jesus, eh? People don't look very closely at other people, eh? Jesus!

The next step of Dunstan's growth was, of course, Diana. But typical of Dunstan, he doesn't worship her in the end as his girlfriend or wife or savior, but just another player in his world of drama. And he drifts slowly on past her and England, having been enriched with experience and a new name:

She had fallen in love with me because she felt she had made whatever I was out of a smashed-up and insensible hospital case; but I don't think it was long before she was just as sure as I that our marriage would never have worked. So I lost a possible wife and gained three very good friends that Christmas.

While reading this book, I was continually occupied with trying to reconcile the fact that so many incidents struck home as if they came from real life, yet the story was also transfused with elements of the magical or near magical (Willie coming back from the dead, the numerous unlikely coincidences of running into Paul again [twice, and on two continents!], seeing Mrs. Demster's face on the Madonna, and the aura that surrounded his occupation with saints and their miracles). Davies has created an implausible, semi-magical world, yet the characters and their tribulations and especially his philosophical analysis of the world have so much to do with real life that you are kept riveted to the book.

This book is full of meaty themes, real characters, interrelated plot lines, interesting history, and superb writing. It is a book that has got me thinking along a number of lines, both within the story and without.

Two technical aspects of this book that I liked was first, the structure being a letter written to a director so that the reader is the director throughout the book. This is a nice frame which gives a sense of reality to the book that it ordinarily would not have if the reader were merely the reader. And second, I really liked the way Davies wrote the one-sided conversations. He did this about four times I believe, the first time with the barber in which you get paragraph after paragraph of what the barber said to Dunstan, but nothing of what Dunstan said. The barber even answers Dunstan's questions, but you don't see the questions, nor do you have to as you know the story and you know Dunstan and you know what he wants to ask the barber. Nice effect. I've never seen that before.

And finally, I liked this book for the very personal reason that I could identify with its narrator, or rather, I found that I want to be like the narrator, Dunstan: He grew up in a small town, noticed its limitations, got out and kept going, found the world fascinating, realized he loved his hometown but could never live there again, wants to be a boy again, doesn't know how to grow old, and has a playful view of life, philosophy, and religion. We all need our heros, and I think Dunstan has become one of mine.

I have forgotten who recommended this book to this club, someone from Canada I think, but I just want to say thank you for introducing me to an unforgettable story and a most superb author!

Edward Tanguay

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