Fifth Business Essay

Spellbinding like his creation Magnus Eisengrim, Robertson Davies is a wizard of the English language. Who says that Canadian literature is bland and unappealing? New York Times applauded Fifth Business – the first of the Deptford triptych – as "a marvelously enigmatic novel, elegantly written and driven by irresistible narrative force." How true this is. Dunstable Ramsay – later renamed Dunstan after St. Dunstan – may be a retired schoolteacher, but what an engaging narrator he is! Shaped by Davies’s colourful writing, Ramsay masterfully relays the story of his role as "fifth business," the unobtrusive yet vital character in life’s drama.

Fifth Business, told in the form of a letter to the schoolmaster, begins with a snowball that young Percy Boyd Staunton throws at Ramsay. The stone-in-a-snowball misses Ramsay but hits Mary Dempster, causing the premature birth of Paul Dempster. Paul grows up to be Magnus Eisengrim, a mysterious and graceful magician. Tormented by his guilt of avoiding the snowball, Ramsay makes Mary his personal saint and is weighed down by his conscience until Mary’s eventual death in an asylum. On the eve of becoming the lieutenant governor of Ontario, "Boy" Staunton is found dead
Sticking to the Bollandist tradition of seeing the light as well as the shadows, Davies does not mince the horrific details of trench warfare. The pain and confusion that Ramsay feels are real, and so are the shocked reactions of the soldiers when they discover that the Bible-reading Ramsay can tell dirty jokes as well! Interestingly, Davies was confident in weaving the crucial plot of the Bollandists into the story, even though he had never before come into formal contact with Bollandists. On the other hand, Davies had spent much of his life understanding the works of Freud and C. G. Jung, but he makes this formidable knowledge accessible to people with little background on