Though as Socrates says in Plato’s Eurythro, we all end up paying a penalty to each other for EACH misdeed!Īnd if there is evil intent in an act of Fifth Business, that evil will be mitigated.

It’s like, if that unstable ‘mixture of frailties’ that is our own uneven lives HADN’T happened the exact way it did, we would never have been as happy as we turned out to be in the end - TRULY Deus Ex Machina, as they said in olden times. Like the serendipitous Fifth Business that long ago introduced me to the girl that was to become my wife.Īnd in a FLASH, the Evil in my life was transformed into Good. This book’s got it all: magic, mystery, and merry Bohemian and Bay Street Mayhem!Īnd you know, if you trust in your lucky stars, even the WORST times in your life - like Staunton’s fateful snowball toss was for some - can end up producing very good things for you. You’d see him most days of the week, they used to say, on the leafy campus - with his long white beard and long white hair, like some Old Testament prophet, decked out in a swanky beret, the nattiest tweeds and twirling an ivory cane!īut he was a highly respected teacher, and a DYNAMITE writer.

I could have met Robertson Davies back in those early days of my life, had my high school marks permitted me to attend the U of T English Faculty. You step into medias res, like in a classical epic - only, if you’re the impressionable kind I was, it seems to open up much like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe presented Narnia - in a shimmering Ice Age of the human spirit.Īnd Fifth Business is a progressively more complicated, murky and allusive affair, as it morphs into the carnival of capricious capers that lurks in the two companion novels of this, the Deptford Trilogy, all set off aptly by the plodding, dourly academic main character (Davies himself?) Dunstan. Life’s not easy, as we all know! But here it’s magical - and parochial, small-town Ontario was never so strangely and savagely serendipitous BEFORE Boy Staunton threw that accursed Snowball.Īnd suddenly it’s a World of Good and Evil Wonders, as if suddenly blanketed in a new two-foot sparkling carpet of Lake Effect snow, with ironic icicles hanging by the wall! All three together make up a long and intriguing journey through the magically murky labyrinths of the human mind. Whuzzat, you ask? Well, to find that out you’ll have to read the book.īut it’s some sort of really Strange Magic, as ELO sang at the time I met my wife in the Seventies. The high school friend who managed - somehow - to hitch me with my lifelong soulmate and wife from a distance of thousands of miles away, many, many years ago, was FIFTH BUSINESS!

Fifth business by robertson davies