World of Wonders

Introduction

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge . . . that the marvellous is indeed an aspect of the real?

—Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

In 1990, as the showstopper of PEN Canada’s annual benefit evening, Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood performed what is now sometimes called their infamous duet. While a piano played a familiar Irving Berlin melody, Atwood began, Anything you can write I can write better, to which Davies replied, I can write anything better than you. When Atwood sang Any word you can use I can use better, Davies chimed back, I can use bigger words better than you. In the middle of their teasing cross-talk, Atwood declared, Any book you can sell I can sell faster, and Davies countered, I can sell faster and vaster than you. No, you can’t. Yes, I can.

At the time of this music-hall turn, Robertson Davies was at the height of his fame as an all-around man of letters, acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, essayist, and lecturer. The books in his Deptford Trilogy—Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975)—had been best sellers and were regularly being taught in schools and universities. His 1985 novel, What’s Bred in the Bone, had been short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. He was even rumored to be a leading candidate to receive what John Updike once referred to as the bounty of Sweden.

Davies didn’t win the Booker, nor was he awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he would certainly have made an ideal laureate. In appearance he was striking—white-haired, white-bearded, and partial to high-buttoned, old-fashioned suits that gave him the air of an Edwardian conjuror, with perhaps a touch of Dr. Faustus. In his public manner, Davies delighted in being theatrical, even stagy. Critics, understandably, soon labeled him the Wizard of the North, and like the original holder of that title—Sir Walter Scott—he often seemed a figure of mystery and romance.

He was also frequently under attack. For much of his fiction-writing career, Davies heard himself dismissed as out of touch with modern literary practice, a crusty purveyor of Tory, upper-class values, even a pseudo-Englishman. Judith Skelton Grant’s capacious biography, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, partly dispelled this image, but not entirely, and Davies remained to the end of his life a favorite whipping boy of the avant-garde. Yet anyone who imagines his work to be provincial or genteel can’t have actually read it. In his public persona as the formidable Master of Massey College, Davies duly honored order, ceremony, and tradition, but his boundary-violating fiction upends proprieties at every turn.

The Deptford Trilogy alone reworks nearly every outrageous element from the Gothic repertoire: religious fanaticism, child abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, sodomy, lesbianism, illegitimacy, decades-old secrets, insanity, mysterious resurrections, long-delayed revenge. The characters in the three novels, who range across all levels of society, include elegant socialites and carnival performers, a madwoman who might be a saint, one of the richest men in Canada, a born-again tramp, and the King of England—not to overlook a magnificently histrionic actor, a genial Jesuit, and a criminal lawyer plagued by trolls. There’s even a ménage à trois consisting of an expert on saint’s lives, a physically deformed bisexual woman, and the world’s greatest magician.

Given such glorious abundance, not to say excess, how could Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders be anything other than irresistibly entertaining? Despite their frequent grotesquerie, the books are suffused with a delicate, light comedy and sometimes recall the witty, conversation-filled novels of Thomas Love Peacock and Aldous Huxley, two of Davies’s favorite writers. In structure, the trilogy presents a series of confessions as three remarkable people relate their lives. Each of them—the teacher, the lawyer, and the illusionist—also plays a part in the novels’ central mystery: Who killed the multimillionaire Boy Staunton?

By spurning quotidian realism, the Deptford Trilogy boldly commingles the extraordinary and the everyday, at times attaining what Davies once called, in talking about melodrama, the compelling immediacy of a dream. In fact, these books might be viewed as early examples of North American magic realism. One critic, Nick Mount, has even written, I can see the Harry Potter generation picking up Davies when they’re older. This was meant as a dig, but it’s precisely what J. K. Rowling fans should do.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1913 in Thamesville, Ontario, William Robertson Davies grew up in a newspaper family. His father, Rupert Davies, had emigrated from Wales to Canada with the aim of making his fortune, which he eventually did, becoming the publisher of The Kingston Whig-Standard and The Peterborough Examiner. Davies’s mother was, in her son’s view, more dutiful than loving, though Robertson and his two brothers enjoyed the privileges available to scions of an upper-class household. The future novelist attended Toronto’s Upper Canada College, the country’s premier private boys’ school, then matriculated at Oxford University. There Davies cut quite the dandyish figure—in one photograph the youthful undergraduate sports a monocle, having, it is said, adopted Dorothy L. Sayers’s foppish detective Lord Peter Wimsey as his beau ideal. At Oxford’s Balliol College, Davies researched the thesis that became his first published book, Shakespeare’s Boy Actors (1939). After completing his degree, he joined the Old Vic theater company in London, then under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie.

In 1938 and 1939 the young actor played various bit parts and taught at the company’s drama school, while also growing friendly with its Australian stage manager, Brenda Newbold. Following the outbreak of World War II, the closing of the theaters, and their marriage in February 1940, the couple left England and sailed to Canada, where Davies learned he was ineligible for military service because of his weak vision. In 1942 Davies’s father invited his son to take on the editorship of The Peterborough Examiner. In light of the obvious nepotism of this appointment, the new editor worked hard to prove his worth, both to his colleagues on the paper and to this small Ontario community of twenty-five thousand people. Davies would remain a professional journalist for the next twenty years.

For most of this time, he produced as many as twelve thousand words a week. While overseeing the day-to-day operation of the Examiner, he also wrote editorials, book reviews, and a humorous, slightly cranky diary supposedly scribbled by one Samuel Marchbanks, under which name Davies could talk—or rant—about anything that caught his attention. His ready wit and versatility also led the young newspaperman to a stint as literary editor of Canada’s weekly cultural magazine Saturday Night. In that position, Davies regularly celebrated books he found life-enhancing. As his biographer Judith Skelton Grant has said, Abundance, grandeur, sweep, imagination, inspiration, power, genius—these were the qualities that made for greatness in his eyes. The same qualities characterize the Deptford Trilogy.

Drama, nonetheless, continued to be Davies’s principal passion. Having theater in their blood, he and his wife, Brenda, attended as many as seventy plays a year during the 1940s and ’50s. They enthusiastically founded their local drama society and often participated in its productions, she as an actress, he as a director or writer. Davies initially yearned to make his name in the theater, and plays like Fortune, My Foe, Eros at Breakfast, Hunting Stuart, and Overlaid remain an important part of his oeuvre.

However, to mount a play is a group effort, one requiring considerable personnel, as well as a stage, rehearsal time, and someone to underwrite the costs. Given such burdensome constraints, not to mention frustration over his lack of big box-office success, Davies decided to give fiction writing a try. The result was Tempest-Tost (1951), the first of three comic novels set in the imaginary Canadian town of Salterton. It dealt with intrigues and love affairs behind the scenes at a provincial production of The Tempest. Its successor, Leaven of Malice (1954), opened with a spurious wedding announcement, followed by further shenanigans at a university and newspaper. A Mixture of Frailties (1958) focused more seriously on the education and personal life of a young Canadian opera singer. By the time the three books were united as the Salterton Trilogy, Davies was firmly established as an important novelist, with Leaven of Malice winning 1955’s Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, one of Canada’s oldest literary prizes.

During the mid-1950s, this journalist-critic-playwright-novelist added still one more activity to his work schedule: adviser to the Stratford Shakespearian Festival. While serving on its governing council, Davies renewed his friendship with Lionel Massey, whom he had known at Oxford. Massey—together with his father, Vincent, and his actor brother, Raymond—wanted to establish a new graduate college at the University of Toronto, one modeled after Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies and restricted to outstanding senior and junior scholars. Because of Davies’s stature as a writer, editor, and arts adviser, he proved a logical choice to become Massey College’s first Master.

From 1963 to 1981, Davies oversaw Massey College and established many of its traditions, while also lecturing to students on the sensation-filled plays of nineteenth-century Britain. (Much of Davies’s course material was repurposed into a scholarly one-hundred-page contribution to The Revels History of Drama in English, 1975.) To Davies, melodrama—despite its broad gestures and frequent corniness—communicated in a primal way by tapping into the unconscious and the archetypal. We thrill to these plays in ways that lie too deep for mere intellect. During these same years, the college’s Master gained a reputation for sartorial and intellectual dash and courtliness, soon becoming a colorful, sought-after public speaker. At Massey’s annual holiday revels, Davies would half read, half perform his own Christmas ghost stories. These were eventually gathered together in the World Fantasy Award–winning collection High Spirits (1982).

While Davies’s many talks, essays, and reviews might have been work-for-hire, he nonetheless used them to reflect on what he most valued in life and literature. In A Voice from the Attic (1960), One Half of Robertson Davies (1977), The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979, revised 1990), and The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1997), he presents himself as essentially a slightly uncommon common reader, albeit one with a penchant for the outré or undeservedly neglected. He particularly relishes the comic, whether earthy or elegant, and his taste runs from the earliest printed joke books to Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, three first-person novels that revolve around art, obsession, and trickery, themes that Davies would probe in his own similar fiction.

It’s worth lingering for a moment more on Davies’s personal literary canon, his desert island classics. He loved Rabelais’s exuberant Gargantua and Pantagruel, Robert Burton’s antiquarian extravaganza The Anatomy of Melancholy, the spooky and humorous Ingoldsby Legends of Richard Barham, and the uncanny tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (best known for The Sandman). Davies also relished Apuleius’s fantastical The Golden Ass (which he likened to his favorite opera, Mozart’s The Magic Flute), the gusto-packed novels of Dickens, Joyce’s polyphonic Ulysses, and even Jacobus de Voragine’s collection of saint’s lives, The Golden Legend. Not surprisingly, the Deptford Trilogy fits snugly into this roster of literary fantastika or, to use Thomas Carlyle’s phrase, which Davies appropriated, Phantasmagoria and Dream-Grotto, where romance is to be found. Such books, in Davies’s words, offer an exploration, extension and reflection of one’s innermost self. A great novel, he further argued, should be more than a diverting tale or parable; it should be a direct revelation of reality.

That last mystical-sounding phrase implies the existence of a religious/supernatural/archetypal realm behind or beyond the glittery surface of things. In fact, Davies’s own work regularly circles around the occult, taken in the widest sense—his books are replete with mysteries, hidden secrets, transcendental yearnings, superstition, religious speculation, seemingly miraculous events, and all the elements of the Victorian sensation novel. In this regard, the Deptford Trilogy resembles not just Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas but also A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed. Davies always insisted that a writer should be entertaining, not in a trivial or shallow way, but in such a way that his readers will want to finish his book, and perhaps think about it.

Such then are a few of the personal and philosophical convictions that nourished the Deptford Trilogy, as well as the five novels that followed it once Davies retired from Massey College. In the 1980s he brought out the three installments of his so-called Cornish Trilogy, comprising an academic comedy, The Rebel Angels (1981); a richly layered and completely wonderful novel about art and the artist called What’s Bred in the Bone (1985); and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988), which tracked the personal and professional high jinks attendant upon the production of an (imaginary) E. T. A. Hoffmann opera, King Arthur, or the Magnanimous Cuckold. Although each of these books can be read separately, they are subtly connected through recurring characters and themes.

In his last years, the Wizard of the North produced the first two installments of a never-completed sequence to have been called the Toronto Trilogy. The first book, Murther and Walking Spirits (1991), is narrated by a vengeful ghost compelled to watch a series of films about his ancestors, who much resemble Davies’s own. Something of a hodgepodge, the book nonetheless shows that even in his late seventies Davies could be surprisingly experimental. In The Cunning Man (1994), the elderly Dr. Jonathan Hullah looks back on his life, recalling mentors and patients, the woman he loved, who married his best friend, and the puzzling dynamics surrounding the death of saintly Father Ninian Hobbes. Much of the writing is very funny. The wife of a certain Dr. Ogg, we learn, had run away long ago to pursue a life of shame in Winnipeg, which must certainly have been more lively than life with Dr. Ogg. Alas, in 1995, just when he was starting work on the third novel in the sequence, Davies died suddenly at the age of eighty-two.

As his penchant for trilogies suggests, Robertson Davies always preferred to work on a large stage. His major novels embrace whole lives, from childhood to old age and death; they trace the growth of a character’s soul, the discovery of a vocation, and the search for meaning in a world seemingly ruled by chance and necessity. Such scope explains much of Davies’s appeal: He presents life as a combination of quest romance, soap opera, and fairy tale. And isn’t such a mixture just what we all secretly wish our lives might be? As Davies declares, we actually do move through a throng of Sleeping Princesses, Belles Dames sans merci, Cinderellas, Wicked Witches, Powerful Wizards, Frog Princes, Lucky Third Sons, Ogres, Dwarves, Sagacious Animal Helpers and . . . Heroes and Heroines, in a world that is nothing less than an enchanted landscape.

FIFTH BUSINESS (1970)

By August 1964, Robertson Davies apparently had the basic plot of Fifth Business pretty clear in his mind. His notebooks refer to my long-pondered tale of the woman who was robbed of her wits by an act of malignancy on the part of a child, & who lives the life of a saint & is requited for it with confinement in a madhouse. Setting: Thamesville, as the root. Characters: the Man of Wealth who begins as the Bad Boy: Mrs. Dempster, the saint, wife of a Methodist parson: her son, who becomes a famous conjuror: Andrew Robertson, the chronicler who is the only one to know the whole story. Its theme, he adds, is Love Denied. That theme runs through the entire Deptford Trilogy.

Davies would soon change the real Thamesville, where he had spent his early childhood, to the fictional Deptford. Andrew Robertson would be renamed Dunstable (later Dunstan) Ramsay. The act of malignancy, which occurs on December 27, 1908, is a snowball containing a stone that misses its target and strikes the pregnant Mrs. Dempster. As a result, the Methodist parson’s young wife goes into premature labor and ever afterward behaves with a haunting simplemindedness. Percy Boyd—known as Boy—Staunton, who threw the snowball, grows up to become one of Canada’s wealthiest tycoons. Ramsay, his intended victim and lifelong friend and enemy, wins the Victoria Cross in World War I, spends decades as a teacher at the exclusive Colborne College boys’ school, and gains scholarly distinction as an expert on saints’ lives. What of Mrs. Dempster’s little boy, Paul, born before his time? He suffers numerous vicissitudes but ultimately achieves world renown under another name. Davies conveys virtually all this information in the first half-dozen pages of Fifth Business.

The book owes its striking title to Brenda Davies, who overheard someone explaining that besides a hero and a heroine, a confidant and a villain, an effective opera requires one additional figure to observe and keep the action moving along. That person was purportedly dubbed Fifth Business. Dunstan Ramsay identifies that role as his own. As he says, This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries. The novel’s epigraph, which explains the meaning of the title, was attributed to Danish playwright Thomas Overskou but was actually invented by Davies himself.

Ramsay begins his story—framed as a letter to the headmaster of Colborne College—with an account of the snowball episode and the guilt he has long felt: If he hadn’t dodged, Mrs. Dempster wouldn’t have been hit. We also learn that Ramsay believes that this now strangely child-like woman might be a miracle-producing saint.

The middle section of Fifth Business focuses on Ramsay’s relationship with Boy Staunton, who possesses the charm of an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero, a talent for making money, and an unwavering devotion to the glamorous Prince of Wales, briefly King Edward VIII. In the private sphere, this Canadian plutocrat behaves callously to those around him, notably his pretty wife and his son, David, the future protagonist of The Manticore. Ramsay smugly, even peevishly declares that for Boy the reality of life lay in external things, whereas for me the only reality was of the spirit. Bluff and shallow, the businessman can hardly remember the snowball incident, which has defined Ramsay’s existence.

Among other things, the incident led the history teacher to the formal study of saints and hagiography. One day, while in Mexico doing research, he drops in on a traveling magic show, the Soirée of Illusions, billed as an entertainment of mystery and beauty, with perhaps a hint of terror as well (which aptly describes Fifth Business and its sequels). The conjuror, Magnus Eisengrim, exhibits a suave, easygoing elegance, neatly captured in Davies’s own suave, easygoing account of the magician’s performance. As Ramsay later recalls:

He invited members of the audience to have a drink with him before he began his serious work, and poured red and white wine, brandy, tequila, whisky, milk, and water from a single bottle; a very old trick, but the air of graceful hospitality with which he did it was enough to make it new. He borrowed a dozen handkerchiefs—mine among them—and burned them in a glass vessel; then from the ashes he produced eleven handkerchiefs, washed and ironed; when the twelfth donor showed some uneasiness, Eisengrim directed him to look towards the ceiling, from which his handkerchief fluttered down into his hands. He borrowed a lady’s handbag, and from it produced a package that swelled and grew until he revealed a girl under the covering; he caused this girl to rise in the air, float out over the orchestra pit, return to the table, and, when covered, to dwindle once again to a package, which, when returned to the lady’s purse, proved to be a box of bonbons. All old tricks. All beautifully done.

Because of this evening’s entertainment, Ramsay finds his life transformed. Eisengrim’s business partner turns out to be Liesl Naegeli, who—despite the ravages of a disease that has left her with misshapen features—is flirtatious, polyamorous, and deeply captivating. She advises Ramsay to give up being Fifth Business. Why don’t you, just for once, do something inexplicable, irrational, at the devil’s bidding, and just for the hell of it? You would be a different man. She adds that such advice is only for the twice-born, who can be recognized because they take new names. Ramsay, the attentive reader will remember, was Dunstable as a child in Deptford, Dunny with friends, Deacon and Charlie while in the army, Dunstan in England (and afterward in Canada), and Cork or Corky to his pupils.

Such a barebones outline of Fifth Business does little to suggest its charm, humor, and suspense. Conceived on a grand scale—besides Canada, the characters spend time in England, Belgium, Italy, Mexico, and Switzerland—it is nonetheless a work of small touches and subtle artistry. Boy Staunton wants to fashion his wife into something she’s not, just as the English nurse Diana hopes to remold Ramsay into her own ideal. Liesl is clearly a modern analogue of the medieval Loathly Lady, who at night becomes more seductive than can be imagined. Staunton, we’re told, seemed to have made himself out of nothing, and he was a marvel; much the same could be said, and even more aptly, of Magnus Eisengrim. Moreover, virtually everyone in the novel keeps secrets, even from the reader. When Ramsay alludes to Mrs. Dempster’s second miracle, he coyly withholds knowledge of her first for many pages; when he revisits his childhood home, he enigmatically remarks that I picked up a few things I wanted—particularly something that I had long kept hidden—and got out as fast as I could. These are sentences that are easy to read right over, the kind Agatha Christie might use to hint at, but not reveal, the identity of the murderer.

Though eminently satisfying as it stands, Fifth Business ends with several mysteries left unresolved, especially those surrounding the sudden death of Boy Staunton. However, the fortune-telling Brazen Head in the Soirée of Illusions does offer some tantalizing, Delphic hints about what happened:

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 innermost wish; and by the inevitable fifth, who was keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone.

THE MANTICORE (1972)

Having adopted an unusual structure for The Manticore, Davies must have felt reassured of the book’s merits when it received the 1972 Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest honor for a work of fiction. (It beat Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.) While Davies’s fiction often features conversations or monologues about philosophy, art, life, and religion, these take center stage in The Manticore.

Originally titled Son and Stranger, The Manticore begins where Fifth Business ends, raising again the question, Who killed Boy Staunton? This time Davies structures his narrative as an account of lawyer David Staunton’s yearlong consultation in Switzerland with a Jungian analyst. I am not going to do anything to you, Dr. Johanna von Haller explains to Boy’s son. I am going to try to help you in the process of becoming yourself.

Though Davies had studied Jung’s ideas intensely, he never actually observed or undertook an analytic relationship (and so was later pleased to learn that he’d accurately caught its rhythms). But, he said, the method appealed to me as a way of telling a great deal about several people (especially David’s awful father) in a newish way. People sometimes forget how adventuresome Davies could be with novelistic form—Murther and Walking Spirits, after all, is narrated by a ghost, and What’s Bred in the Bone opens with a conversation between an angel and its hero’s guardian daimon.

According to Davies, about halfway through Fifth Business he realized that he knew a great deal more about my characters than could be suitably included in the novel which was in progress. This extra knowledge pushed him to amplify the main story. In The Manticore, he enriches our understanding of Boy Staunton by focusing largely on the tycoon’s family and household, while later, in World of Wonders, he will recount the amazing experiences of Paul Dempster, the baby born prematurely because of that fateful snowball. All three novels share a retrospective tone, each being a roundabout inquiry into the past that leads to revelations in the present.

David Staunton—alcoholic, unmarried, and middle-aged—yearns to know the undistorted truth about himself, his father, and his family. Fearing incipient madness, this otherwise coolly rational lawyer travels to Zurich for guidance. Like a judge, he has weighed the evidence of his recent erratic behavior and sentenced himself to seek professional help for his anxious and roiled psyche. He aims to face what he learns to call his trolls. You remember, Davies once remarked in a lecture, that Ibsen said that life was a struggle with trolls, but the trolls may be persuaded to yield deep secrets. They may, to some heroes of the inner struggle, yield what Jung spoke of as ‘primordial experiences’—secrets from the depths of the human spirit.

While Fifth Business worries a lot about women and mothers, The Manticore explores oppressive male power. To the world, Boy—who made his fortune from sugar and sugary confections—comes across as sweetness incarnate. He was, admits David, really the most charming man I have ever known, in a sunny, open way. Yet this doesn’t prevent the alpha male of the Alpha Corporation from crushing the spirit out of his wife and son. Feeling himself a failure in his father’s eyes, David compensates by transforming himself into a formidable trial lawyer, constructing his entire existence around being a winner. Still, even in death his father continues to dominate him. To be torn between love and hate of the same person is ambiguity indeed, Davies later explained, and quite enough to make a man rebellious, cynical, a drunkard, and perhaps—if things go too far—a madman.

To be torn between love and hate—such a polar opposition—is yet another instance of the trilogy’s heavy traffic in dualities and ambiguities. Throughout the books, there are symbolic undercurrents that juxtapose materialism and spiritualism, coldness and passion, illusion and reality. Moreover, that simple-seeming snowball incident grows increasingly multifaceted and Rashomon-like: Were its consequences ultimately good or bad? In the end, Davies seems to argue for the acceptance of a certain blurriness about such questions. To paraphrase Chekhov, it takes a god to be able to distinguish between success and failure in life.

But what of David Staunton? Is there any hope for him? Dr. von Haller tells her patient, You are forty. That is a critical age. Between thirty-five and forty-five everybody has to turn a corner in his life, or smash into a brick wall. If you are going to gain a measure of maturity, now is the time.

Throughout his anamnesis, as psychologists refer to a directed period of recollection, David vividly recalls his family’s repulsive nurse-housekeeper Netty (who worships Boy), a blind Oxford don and mentor, his devious social-climbing stepmother, Denyse, and the misunderstood homosexual priest Father Knopwood. Nothing in his past, he insists, is so terribly unusual, adding that the Stauntons weren’t some family in the mythic drama of Greece. They were just a family of the twentieth century, and a Canadian family at that, supposedly the quintessence of everything that is emotionally dowdy and unaware. Yes and no: Davies would argue that the mythic suffuses human action, even when we are unaware of it. Note, for example, that a former mistress of Boy’s is called Myrrha, the name Ovid gives to a daughter whose perverse desires lead to incest with her father.

When David relates his dreams—all borrowed from Davies’s own—his therapist designates their obviously symbolic content as The Comedy Company of the Psyche or, more technically, Jungian archetypes. These, she explains, represent and body forth patterns toward which human behaviour seems to be disposed; patterns which repeat themselves endlessly, but never in precisely the same way.

Today, psychoanalysis has lost much of its former prestige. In one Washington, DC, used bookstore, Freud’s works are shelved in fiction. Jung’s essays, however, could live happily in the literary criticism section: They show us how Story works. The Hero’s night journey, the adversarial Shadow, the Wise Old Man, the Crone, the feminine Anima, combat with monsters, ritual death, and resurrection—these representative characters and scenes reappear throughout fiction, most visibly in heroic fantasies such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea or any Marvel Universe comic. You need only the slightest acquaintance with Jung to see his hand in Davies’s writing.

In explaining the female anima figure, Dr. von Haller ends by telling David that men revenge themselves very thoroughly on women they think have enchanted them. This is apparently what happened with Boy, who married the most beautiful girl in Deptford and then discovered that he had very little in common with her. After the erotic intensity faded, the marriage quickly went downhill. As Davies once wrote, Has anybody ever said that enchantment was a basis for marriage? . . . The table must be laid with more solid fare than that if starvation is to be kept at bay for sixty years. In every sphere, not just the sexual, the Deptford Trilogy repeatedly depicts the power of enchantment and, inevitably, the consequences of disenchantment.

Only midway through The Manticore are we told about its central symbol. In one of his dreams David meets a wise, Sibyl-like woman in white leading a strange beast by a golden chain. The beast possesses the body of a lion, a serpent’s tail, and the face of a man. It is a manticore, Dr. von Haller explains, and represents aspects of David himself: Head of a man, brave and dangerous as a lion, capable of wounding with barbs? But not a whole man, or a whole lion, or a merely barbed opponent. She concludes, So might not your undeveloped feeling turn up in a dream as a noble creature, but possibly dangerous and only human in part?

Only human in part? The healthy integration of the self is the principal aim of Jungian analysis, and it usually occurs, if at all, in middle age. As psychiatrist Anthony Storr has said, In the first half of life, a person is, and should be, concerned with emancipating himself from parents and with establishing himself in the world as spouse, parent, and effective contributor. . . . But once a person has done so, then he could and should look inwards. Jung called the journey toward wholeness the ‘process of individuation.’ All Davies’s mature fiction depicts this process of individuation. By the end of The Manticore, Dunstan Ramsay, the teacher of history, has reappeared and finally frees himself from the burden of the past. And what of David Staunton? Guided by Liesl Naegeli, he will descend into the bowels of the earth and there, in the darkness, discover illumination.

WORLD OF WONDERS (1975)

The Manticore emphasizes the various social masks that people assume or have thrust upon them. But where does the persona end and the person begin? In one sickly humorous but symbolic scene, David Staunton’s stepmother insists on a plaster death mask of the dead Boy’s face. But to save money, she hires a dentist to do the work, which he botches. World of Wonders further probes the complexities of identity, in particular the search for, or discovery of, one’s real self. Adding yet another turn to the kaleidoscopic ramifications of that life-altering snowball, World of Wonders is the story of how Paul Dempster, the child born too soon, eventually transforms himself into Magnus Eisengrim, the greatest magician in the world.

While Fifth Business is structured as a letter and The Manticore as a yearlong therapy session, this last novel in the trilogy falls into the leisurely and congenial form of the club tale or after-dinner reminiscence. Eisengrim is starring in a film about the French illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, and one night, seeking to sharpen and deepen his performance—to give it what he calls a subtext—he decides to talk about his own past. His audience comprises the film’s producer, director, and cameraman, as well as Liesl Naegeli and Dunstan Ramsay.

Even as a toddler in Deptford, the future magician already displayed preternatural skill in manipulating coins and cards. So naturally, Eisengrim recalls, when a carnival trundled into town, he just had to see Willard the Wizard and, just as naturally, he was entranced. What could be more dazzling to a little boy than the wizard’s final trick of eating a spool of thread and a packet of needles, and then producing the thread from his mouth, with all the needles threaded on it at intervals of six inches?

Throughout the Deptford Trilogy Davies interrogates the nature of enchantment, the dynamics of illusion. Despite severe physical deformities, Liesl possesses profound glamour, the power to fascinate. Eisengrim—who is always on—views his ability to keep an audience spellbound as the essence of his life. To young Paul’s misfortune Willard the Wizard’s razzle-dazzle hides a vicious nature. Still, when Wanless’s World of Wonders travels on, the boy goes with it.

A lover of theater himself, Davies uses Eisengrim’s rise to stardom to celebrate virtually every aspect of the performing arts: carnival acts, vaudeville, repertory drama companies, street corner escape artists, touring magic shows, movies. At his lowest ebb during his carny days, the exploited and abused Paul regards himself as a nothing, a Nobody. But like Odysseus—who calls himself Nobody when he confronts the monstrous Cyclops—Paul is a survivor. Being a tabula rasa allows him to reboot, to create a new self. Besides learning Willard’s tricks and sleight-of-hand skills, Paul acquires insight into human psychology from Zingara, the troupe’s fortune-teller. As she tells him, I’ve got mystery, and that’s what everybody wants. People yearn for more from life than to eat and sleep like beasts: They dream of romance. They hunger for magic.

As Paul’s own life goes on, he takes at least four different names, gradually shaping an identity of his own. Hired to perform acrobatic turns in swashbuckling melodramas, he becomes the body double for the aging Sir John Tresize, based on the real-life actor-manager Sir John Martin-Harvey (whom Davies much admired). Tresize and his wife—known as Milady—preserve an outmoded thespian tradition, strutting the stage with histrionic gestures, statuesque poses, and soaring flights of rhetoric. Such an acting style, in the service of sentimental tearjerkers and old warhorses like The Bells and The Corsican Brothers, is readily dismissed today, but Davies believed that nineteenth-century theater tapped into surprisingly deep wells.

Though it could seem crude and simplistic, Victorian melodrama, contended Davies, explored that inner world of the psyche where the unfinished business of life is to be found—the wounds that have not been healed, the sorrows that have not been assuaged, the loves that have not been requited, the sense of having been used less than justly by life. Those phrases practically sum up the Deptford Trilogy. But melodrama also offered the solace of chivalry, constancy and renunciation; it asserted the existence of a Providence that would give the good man, after heavy trials, his due. For the tragic concept of a Fate indifferent to merely human and personal concerns it substituted poetic justice. Again, this is the Deptford Trilogy to a T.

Does this mean that Davies’s novels are, as some have sneered, old-fashioned? Not really, unless you regard compelling readability as old-fashioned. In fact, the Deptford Trilogy might be slotted into any number of different niches. The books’ tutelary spirits could easily be two rival novelists of ideas: the sprightly Aldous Huxley, of the satirical Crome Yellow and Antic Hay, and the serious Thomas Mann, the multigenerational chronicler of Buddenbrooks. Structurally, the trilogy looks a lot like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, as it slowly unfolds the multiple facets of the same key events. At the same time, given their years of publication, the three linked books might be called a mega-novel, to use the term associated with the roughly contemporary works of William Gaddis, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon.

Above all, the Deptford Trilogy is right at home with the classics of international magic realism: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, Angela Carter’s Wise Children, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Each of these novels captures the distinctive character of its author’s homeland, but does so on a grand scale, while also mixing gritty, realistic details with fantasy, myth, Arabian Nights–style adventure, horror, tall tale, and every kind of marvel.

These days we have grown accustomed to our best novels being impossible to categorize as anything but sui generis. Yet even fifty years ago genres had already become porous, permeable, blurred. The Deptford Trilogy is, at once, a romance and a melodrama and a mystery and a novel of ideas and a work of historical fiction and a satire and a metafiction and a roman à clef. It can be read and interpreted as any or all of the above. It’s slippery.

In World of Wonders a diverse and distinguished company converses over whisky and tobacco, arguing about the theater, the nature of evil, the unseen consequences of our actions, people’s need for mystery and enchantment. The mature Eisengrim, while often as iron-grim as his stage name, confesses that he still feels beglamoured by the theater and even the back-alley stage doors in provincial towns: For me, that desolate and dirty entry was always cloaked in romance. I would rather go through one of those doors, even now, than walk up a garden path to be greeted by a queen. Isn’t that lovely? Elsewhere the austere magician—knowing that he is close to retirement—remembers taking off his theatrical paint with a feeling of exaltation and desolation combined, as if I had never been so happy before, and would certainly never be so happy again. One envies Eisengrim and Davies such memories.

For much of World of Wonders, Liesl is unfathomably silent, but toward the end she laments that we have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder have been banished. Instead we worship its antithesis: security. For, after all, wonder isn’t just marvelous, it is undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless.

Undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless—isn’t that also one description of great art? The Deptford Trilogy is certainly great art, as it explores the consequences of parental oppression, the shifting ground between perception and reality, how evil and good may be unexpectedly interlaced, and several of the more unusual byways and mysteries of love. Most of all, the three books remind us, again and again, that learning who and what you are can take half a lifetime.

At the close of World of Wonders Dunstan Ramsay and Magnus Eisengrim address for one last time the riddle of Boy Staunton’s death. What really happened that night? An act of madness or an instance of poetic justice? Who, finally, killed Boy Staunton? The answer—but is it the right one?—will surprise you.

MICHAEL DIRDA

World of Wonders

1

A BOTTLE IN THE SMOKE

1

Of course he was a charming man. A delightful person. Who has ever questioned it? But not a great magician.

By what standard do you judge?

Myself. Who else?

You consider yourself a greater magician than Robert-Houdin?

"Certainly. He was a fine illusionist. But what is that? A man who depends on a lot of contraptions—mechanical devices, clockwork, mirrors, and such things. Haven’t we been working with that sort of rubbish for almost a week? Who made it? Who reproduced that Pâtissier du Palais-Royal we’ve been fiddling about with all day? I did. I’m the only man in the world who could do it. The more I see of it the more I despise it."

But it is delightful! When the little baker brings out his bonbons, his patisseries, his croissants, his glasses of port and Marsala, all at the word of command, I almost weep with pleasure! It is the most moving reminiscence of the spirit of the age of Louis Philippe! And you admit that you have reproduced it precisely as it was first made by Robert-Houdin. If he was not a great magician, what do you call a great magician?

"A man who can stand stark naked in the midst of a crowd and keep it gaping for an hour while he manipulates a few coins, or cards, or billiard balls. I can do that, and I can do it better than anybody today or anybody who has ever lived. That’s why I’m tired of Robert-Houdin and his Wonderful Bakery and his Inexhaustible Punch Bowl and his Miraculous Orange Tree and all the rest of his wheels and cogs and levers and