The Cunning Man.

Ross, Robert

Robertson Davies's twelve works of fiction manage to offer both a limited and a broad social history of twentieth-century Canada. The books are limited because they focus for the most part on upper-class, educated, art-loving Canadians of British descent who live in Toronto. The novels broaden in outlook when these characters meet what they would likely call the "working class" or when they venture outside Toronto -- heaven forbid, unless they go to Europe. And a whiff of snobbery always lingers over the narratives. A strict proponent of postcolonial theory would probably reject Davies's work as "unpost" and relegate it to colonial literature of an earlier time.

No matter, though. Davies's reputation remains secure; and his new novel makes no concessions to what might be literary fashion in so-called postcolonial nations. Published in the author's eighty-first year, The Cunning Man takes up the lives of privileged, Anglo-Saxon Canadians, celebrates Toronto, and seems more elitist than usual. Told by the aging Dr. Jonathan Hullah, the text is derived from "a few notes" he writes in an old casebook as he prepares for interviews with a reporter from the Colonial Advocate who is working on a series called "The Toronto That Used To Be."

A vintage Davies creation, the good physician is wealthy, supercilious, cultured, sophisticated, at times a pompous bore, at other times reasonably human. He considers himself a "cunning man" because he follows in his unorthodox medical practice Robert Burton's seventeenth-century treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy, which explains that such men, "if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind." This framework not only allows Davies to instruct extensively on diagnostic medicine but also to indulge in some of his favorite subjects: the right foods and proper interior decoration, academia, paintings, sacred music and ritual in the transported Church of England, backstage dynamics of theatrical productions, the advantages of colonial boys' schools patterned on the English model, the tedium and provincialism of Canadian life outside Toronto, the role of the artist in a newfound society.

The narrative does introduce a new dimension to Davies's inventory, and that is homosexuality. The doctor's neighbors known as The Ladies are in truth two British lesbians who eloped in desperation to Canada, where they have gained fame for their salon that encourages artistic development in Toronto. As a young medical student and amateur actor, Hullah recalls coming into contact with gay theatrical types but assures the reader more than once that he did not indulge in such practices. In fact, one of The Ladies appears to regret her relationship as she approaches death. Can Davies be accused not only of being mired in the colonial period but of being homophobic as well?

Among the various acquaintances who affect the cunning man's life a half-mad Church of England priest emerges as the most engaging. Long on ritual and short on spirituality, the priest fails in his obsession to create a genuine Canadian saint, even though his method is a novel one. Eventually sent into exile to a parish beyond Toronto, he takes up serious drinking and possibly discovers his own humanity in the process -- a discovery that few of the characters seem to make in what the narrator calls "the Great Theatre of Life" where the "admission is free but the taxation is mortal."

Still, in spite of the predictability, the instructive digressions, the occasional pomposity, the snobbery, a Davies novel never fails to delight and entertain. Perhaps those very qualities are what lend this un-Canadian yet most Canadian body of fiction its lasting appeal.