THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503020425
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
THE CUNNING MAN
ROBERTSON DAVIES
Viking. 469 pp. $23.95.
I HAVE TO CONFESS that Robertson Davies is not exactly my cup of tea, though I am often puzzled by the why of it. Maybe because the Canadian writer is tea and I am coffee, Tory where I would be Whig, social where I find myself political, smug when I would prefer brash. Most of all, I object to the literariness of his fiction - and this no doubt sounds strange from a literature professor - the immersion in allusion, the bookish chitchat that his Anglo-Canadian characters find so appealing. Wake up and smell the coffee! I want to shout at his rectors and doctors and editors - but then, no one is drinking coffee.
Having exposed my bias so openly, I will go on to say that The Cunning Man is vintage Davies - indeed, rather better than his last two novels. Much of the action precedes the story of his previous book, Murthers & Walking Spirits. In that novel, a murdered man, Connor Gilmartin, narrates his family's past as if it were a film festival, turning at the last to his own life and sudden demise. In this new work, Connor's father, Brochwel, is the boyhood chum of narrator Jonathan Hullah, and young Gilmartin's wife in Murthers is the newspaper reporter whose interviews with Hullah, ``The Cunning Man,'' provide the book's framework.
When Esme Barron (she is not yet married) visits Dr. Hullah, she wants to know particularly about an episode Hullah has witnessed - the sudden death in the pulpit of a beloved Anglican priest, Father Hobbes. Hullah has only a few things to say about it: As a physician, he rushed to help the stricken Hobbes, but was waved away by the assisting rector, another schoolmate, Charlie Iredale. Iredale, it seems, tried to turn the father's death into a heavenly taking and began encouraging talk of sainthood for Hobbes; Hullah, a rational fellow, wants to save the embarrassment of Iredale's association with something so dotty from being relived in the press.
But in obfuscating the matter, Hullah leads himself back in memory to replay his own life and his relations with his close friends Iredale and Brochwel. Some of that life is at boarding school, among the smart-alecks. Brochwel gives a paper on what happened to Polonius' body in ``Hamlet,'' for example. This sort of thing is meat for Davies, taking up four pages alone, but it is less arch than clever in a sophomoric kind of way - just right, of course, for a schoolboy trying to show off. Even so, with Hullah's life of little interest in itself, and the mystery of Hobbes' death far from being probed past the surface, the book teeters badly and threatens to collapse under its trifling incidents and literary weight.
Davies rescues his novel, however, with two lesbian characters, the wretchedly named Pansy Freake and Emily Raven-Hart. Emily is the sort of beauty men weep for, but Pansy is a good egg, a foster mother to all sorts of artistic endeavors and a good antidote to the self-conscious Hullah. Hullah himself at this point in the novel begins to make a reputation for going outside traditional medicine, taking into account Anangke, or fate. He allows the patient's personality and to some extent spiritual state - though he is not conventionally religious - to determine the pathway to healing. With his own development and Pansy's newsy letters, Hullah reveals much more about the characters.
One of Hullah's great paired interests, he claims, is religion and theater. Thus the book establishes a conflict between the theatrical death of Hobbes and Iredale's canonizing interpretation of it with Hullah's quieter, nonspectacular pursuit of complete understanding of the self. Religion is theater, but that in itself is not always bad. In the end, the death explained, we come to some satisfaction of plot, if not of the big questions. Hullah, largely a cipher, has tossed off references to a whole variety of English literature, including his own model, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. But The Cunning Man has done more performing than elucidating. Admirable in many ways, Davies' novel still makes me want one more thing - a cup of coffee. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University. by CNB