I came very late to the cult of Robertson Davies, the bearded wizard of Canadian letters, and it is a pleasure to have my faith reinforced by his latest work, "The Cunning Man."
This new novel of saints and dreams, sex and murder, is not an easy introduction to Davies. And it would be risky to say it is the finale from an 81-year-old man who has written more than 30 books.But "The Cunning Man" is a fine example of Davies' storytelling sorcery and a thorough summary of a life's learning.
It is also proof that magical realism is not limited to Latin America. Strange things do happen in the land of the midnight sun, as beautiful as the northern lights and as dark as sea monsters, as E. Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News" demonstrated in bleakest Newfoundland.
Davies, however, finds the magical beauty of art and soul and the ugly realism of lost lives and loves in the most provincial corners of Ontario.
Not surprisingly, Davies is a Canadian national treasure. Although he is unashamedly "old school," Davies' patriotism and Anglicanism are as gentle as they are genuine. His nationalism reflects itself not in anti-Americanism, but in his concentration on the people and places of Canada, and to some degree their antecedents in England - and in the Middle Ages.
If this seems too narrow and unmodern a slice of the world, that is a misconception crucial to Davies' mission: To find miracles and magic in the dispirited small towns and smug suburbs of 1950s Canada.
Many of Davies heroes/narrators are likewise unremarkable. Whether priest, lawyer or schoolteacher, they are quiet, dullish men of little success or even happiness, but considerable learning - and eventually more wisdom and character than expected.
Davies specializes in whole lives, shaped from birth by hope and tragedy, to demonstrate that all life is troubled, to be survived with courageous endurance, inspired by belief in illusions we cannot understand: from grand opera to the religious ritual of gypsies and high churchmen.
The cunning man of the title is Dr. Jonathan Hullah. He practices the modern magic of medicine but as a humanistic diagnostician, trained in Plato and Paracelsus. A sickly child saved by the snakes and smoke of an Indian healer in a remote mining town, Hullah becomes a big-city specialist known for his divining insight. Still he knows he cannot abolish death and ill health; he can only listen well. His cruelest war duty was in a ward of those wounded by "friendly fire," whom he could relieve only with readings of classic verse, and peacetime patients often refuse his prescriptions of reason, prayer or theater.
Hullah does not rely on psychosomaticism or psychoanalysis, but acknowledges the force of "anangke" (fate or necessity) as the principle that rules wisdom and knowledge. It would be a provocative text for medical schools.
Davies' own cunning is not limited to men; his portrayals of women are strong and deep. This novel centers on the extended family of St. Aidan's Church, which includes Pansy "Chips" Todhunter and Emily Raven-Heart, lesbians who fled postwar England to make new lives in Toronto. It is a heartbreaking portrait of decades of love to the death.
There are a dozen exquisite portraits here - cuckolded best friends, saint-obsessed priests and visionless grubbers. And they are told in various voices, from Chip's letters home to Hullah's notes for his casebook and guarded interviews with a beguiling reporter.
It can be slow going, because Davies' vocabulary, diction and breadth of reference, from mythology to medicine, might tax a John Barth scholar. But his stories tell of love affairs and friendships as long as those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
You must also allow Davies to grump about deconstructionism, by having Hullah turn his medical prescience to literature, explaining away characters and plots of fiction in the unglamorous clinical language of sickness and death.
Yet Hullah/Davies knows those are superficial diagnoses. The characters of great literature, including Hullah's patients, "must die of being themselves." Such insight, regardless of place or time, is what gives Davies classic stature as far more than the Trollope of modern Canada.
"The Cunning Man" is itself evidence of the potency of literature as a healing art.