Fifth Business (Deptford Trilogy)

Fifth Business (Deptford Trilogy)

The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed  The Deptford Trilogy,  with a new foreword by Kelly Link Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous.  Fifth Business  stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. “If you are the kind of reader who looks for traces of the marvelous and the unexpected in narrative as well as daily life, then soon you will, like me, treasure these novels.” —Kelly Link   “ 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.’” —Michael Dirda Fifth Business Reading Group Guide: INTRODUCTION "We 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 Servers, yes and Heroes and Heroines, in a world that is nothing less than an enchanted landscape." —Robertson Davies Myth, magic, and miracles, freaks, saints, and devils--such is the world of wonders unleashed by a simple snowball thrown in the village of Deptford in 1908. Fifth Business is Davies's masterwork, the book that cemented his reputation as one of the great storytellers of our time. When the book appeared in 1970, he had already published the three books of his Salterton Trilogy , which won him recognition in his native Canada as an incisive cultural critic and an endlessly entertaining novelist. He had struck a note near Mark Twain in his portrayal of small-town culture, satirizing the residents' pious absurdities without seeming cruel, dramatizing their dreams and good intentions without becoming sentimental. With Fifth Business , he plumbed new artistic and spiritual depths. The opening scene, which he envisioned taking place at his boyhood home in Thamesville, Ontario, haunted Davies from the first time it appeared to him in about 1960 until he began to draft the novel ten years later: "It was simply a scene that kept occurring in my mind, which was of two boys on a village street on a winter night--I knew from the look of the atmosphere that it must be just around Christmas-time--and one boy threw a snowball at the other boy. Well, that was all there was to it, but it came so often and was so insistent that I had to ask myself, Why is that boy doing that and what is behind this and what is going on?" Many elements of the novel that emerged from this vision were drawn from Davies's early childhood. Like Dunstable Ramsay's father, Davies's father was the one-man publisher of a village newspaper, and Davies grew up in the newspaper business. "In a newspaper family," he said, "you learn not only all the news that's fit to print, but all the news that is not fit to print, and you acquire an insight into human nature and the essence of a community which is very hard to acquire . . . in any other way." Like his protagonist in Fifth Business , Davies was raised in the Presbyterian Church. Although he eventually rejected its particular doctrines, he retained a strongly religious temperament. His spiritual explorations ultimately found resonance in the works of Carl Gustav Jung. "Orthodox Christianity has always had for me the difficulty that it really won't come . . . to grips with the problem of evil," Davies said. "What looks good can be pushed to the point that it becomes evil, and . . . evil very frequently bears what can only be regarded as good fruit." Jung had portrayed God as a psychological reality that embraced polarities of good and evil, light and shadow; the devil is an inextricable part of him. One had to confront this shadow face-to-face in order to live a moral life. "The devil is the unexamined side of life," Davies said, "and the great evils spring from acting without knowledge of your subconscious intentions." Davies was also drawn to Jung's de