Robertson Davies (1913-1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. According to Wikipedia—and I have no reason to question their article—he was one of Canada's “best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished ‘men of letters,’ an unfashionable term Davies gladly accepted for himself.” He published a dozen works of fiction, more than eight plays, and eight books of criticism and essays. The Cunning Man(1994), a novel, was his last book.
The book is so rich, so packed with incident and characters, so studded with interesting thoughts and observations, I am afraid it is beyond me to summarize the plot. Basically, Jon grows up in a small town in northern Ontario in which his father is the manager of the mine that is the reason for the town’s existence.
The town abuts a native people’s “reserve,” and Jon is healed of scarlet fever by and becomes friends with Mrs. Smoke, a “wise woman” and herbalist. He is shipped to Toronto to a private boys school where he makes lifelong friends with Brochwel Gilmartin, who becomes a professor, and Charlie Iredale, who becomes an Anglican priest at St. Aidan’s, an Episcopal church that is—except for the Pope—is more Catholic than any Catholic church in Toronto with a mixed choir for the hymns, an eight-man men’s choir for plainsong, the best organist in town, incense, vestments, and more.
The mystery running through the book is what actually happened to old Father Hobbes, who drooped dead in front of the High Altar at St. Aidan’s just as he lifted the consecrated host. Jon was in the church at the time and hurried to help although no longer a police surgeon, but Charlie, who was also officiating in the service, waved him away. The curious event of Father Hobbes’s death pulls the reader through the novel. The explanation is unexpected and satisfying.
Along the way to the denouement with plenty of digressions en route, we watch Jon grow up in tiny, remote Sioux Lookout, follow his school days at Colborne and at university where he falls victim of a clever practical joke. In an amateur theatrical group, he meets and falls in love with Nuala Conor.
Nuala “was the first girl I met with a genuine sense of humour. Of course, I had known many girls who laughed a lot, often when there was nothing to laugh at, and behind their girlish laughter there might always be seen the mirthless faces of their mothers, grim prophecies of what those girls would in time become.”
They become lovers and remain lovers for fifty years, though Jon never marries and Nuala marries Jon’s friend Gilmartin. Nuala has a son who could possibly be Jon’s child, though in those pre-DNA times, the boy’s paternity remains a question in Jon’s mind.
We live through WWII with Jon as a doctor who is almost killed by an unexploded bomb that explodes as he’s is taking a bath in a London hotel. He recovers and helps badly wounded Canadian soldiers who suffered from “friendly fire.” War is bad enough; how much worse to lose a limb to your own troops?
Back in Toronto, Jon settles into a life as a police surgeon and is a wiz at diagnosis. He builds a career as the MD who will take patients other doctors have found insufferable, those for whom medical science find no proximate cause for their pain but which sends them from one practitioner to another until they wash up in Jon’s surgery.
The Cunning Man is worth studying to understand how it’s constructed: what Davies dramatizes as an important scene/event in the narrator’s life, what he chooses to simply tell as a way to move the story along, how he describes characters (like the snippet about Nuala above), and how he uses a variety of techniques to maintain the reader’s interest over 469 pages in the life of an invented Toronto doctor.
I did not expect to enjoy in the book as much as I did. (What do I care about 20th century Toronto life?) But on reflection, I realize it has more to teach me. I am going to keep it and will read it again.
