The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

Viking penguin, $23.95

It may be that there are two kinds of great writers: those who reinvent themselves with every work and those who pound away at the same obsessions again and again with each new piece. If Robertson Davies qualifies--and his reception in the world of letters as a great writer has been growing steadily for the last twenty years--he certainly belongs in the second category. Davies' consistent fascinations structure his whole body of work. The same questions run throughout his fictions, linking them thematically and formally. His writing gives the sense of a larger architecture, as if there is one great story behind the different plots of the more than thirty books he has produced. And whether a great writer or merely a good one (and he is surely one of the two), Robertson Davies has managed to ask the same kinds of questions for decades and still write books that seem fresh and bold.

The Cunning Man is the Case Book of the cunning man himself, Dr. Jonathan Hullah, and thus allows itself all the quirks of a personal journal. Dr. Hullah's account, folding over itself in time again and again, is ostensibly a set of notes intended to result in a great book, "an anatomy of fiction" the doctor will write: a study of the great books and the diseases within them. But the journal is much more interesting than the study could ever be, we suspect, and the result turns out to be, more or less, the good doctor's autobiography. It's hard to not to feel inordinately thankful that we are presented with an exploration of what is in Hullah's mind and heart rather than the menstrual cycle of Emma Bovary or dental hygiene aboard the Pequod.

Jonathan Hullah is from Sioux Lookout which, he tells us, lies "nearly 2000 miles northwest of Toronto." Although this sounds to an American like code for the North Pole, the narrative stays in the township long enough to give the young Hullah a youthful bout with scarlet fever (childhood disease is a favorite repeated trope of Davies), the friendship of an Indian healer and wise woman named Mrs. Smoke (who saves him with neither scalpel nor the Merck Manual) and a lifelong interest in medicine, especially non-traditional medicine.

But Davies doesn't take long to whisk us away to Toronto, where at Colborne College we are introduced to the young Brocky Gilmartin, who will become a professor of literature as the narrative unfolds, and Charlie Iredale, future Anglican priest. Hullah's two friends take opposite positions within the book: Brocky is clever and laughing, Charlie plodding and serious. We follow their progress into adulthood, and Dr. Hullah's exploits in war, in love, in theater.

The Cunning Man does not, however, purport to be Hullah's chronological autobiography, and does not move as a blow-by-blow account from Sioux Lookout to the moment Hullah takes up pen and begins to write.

Chronology is decidedly unlinear in the novel, with different periods of the past flashing in and out as they relate to the events of the present. The impetus of his memory--and memory does comprise the bulk of the novel--is a series of articles by the journalist Esme Barron (later Esme Gilmartin--she marries Conor, Brocky's son) about old Toronto and for which she is interviewing Hullah. This narrative strand, the present, which brings about the memory aspect of the novel, continues on its own for years. Brocky, Charlie, and Hullah are middle-aged, and by the end, old men.

And by this time Dr. Hullah has developed quite a bit of his own philosophy, which will be suspiciously familiar to devotees of Mr. Davies. Doctors are kinds of priests and priests are kinds of doctors. Priests are kinds of poets as well, and Dr. Hullah begins to think about writing his great "Anatomy of Fiction." What else could we expect? Esme Barron and Conor Gilmartin, as well as Hugh McWearie, reappear from Davies' last novel, Murther and Walking Spirits; old Dunstan Ramsey steps out of The Deptford Trilogy for rather a lengthy visit, joined as well by his friend Boy Stanton (referred to in passing and not named, though the description matches the sugar baron), and we visit Salterton, site of Davies' first trilogy.

Davies, like great writers before him, has begun to fashion his own living universe. It is a universe which makes us believe--and become intensely aware--that its characters live a life outside of the books. Dunstan Ramsey gives a lecture in The Cunning Man of which we hear not a breath in Fifth Business, narrated by Ramsey and about his life. This gives us the startling sensation that there is a universe behind the books, that Ramsey is a person who distilled his own life into a book, rather than a mere puppet animated only for literature. No living person writing an autobiography tells all he or she knows, and Davies is not telling us all he knows. Neither is Hullah. Ramsey is alive--or, at least, there is still much more to his life than we know, and it exists without there being a book about it. His cameo appearance reminds us that there are things we don't know about him, and suggests that they exist. In The Cunning Man it is up to Dr. Hullah, as he unwittingly reminds us, to "decide how much I was prepared to tell." But he tells us quite enough for now.

The Cunning Man constructs marriages of science and religion, as well as literature and medicine, in keeping with the Canadian writer's synthetical, Platonic worldview, and Davies' long success at barking up the same trees is particularly easy to explain from the book: the man is a storyteller, and a fine one. Whether Robertson Davies is a great writer is a good question, but a better one is: does he tell a good story? The answer is quite clearly yes. He tells a good story and he tells it well, and we are the better for it.