The Cunning Man

We're in classic Robertson Davies country here, middle-class Toronto between the 1920s and the 1980s, with a cast of actors, musicians, artists, journalists and High Anglican priests and a mock-Trollope plot involving an Archdeacon at war with a parish that has been overdoing the bells-and-smells. In the middle of it all is our narrator Jonathan Hullah, a physician who believes — as I suspect most physicians do — that he has far better insight than his colleagues into his patients' problems. He attributes this superior ability partly to his reading of The anatomy of melancholy and partly to a childhood encounter with a Native-American healer and some snakes.

As we would expect, there's a strong whiff of Faustian bargains and black show more magic hanging around in the background, whilst the foreground story is full of people who start out with great promise and ambitious plans and end up in Canadian mediocrity, carving statues of the Queen Mother out of Ontario Creamery Butter. Hullah, of course, learns the limitations of his medical cunning. I don't think Davies can have been very happy when he wrote this, but there's a lot of fine sardonic humour here for the reader to enjoy, all the same. show less

It's been so long since I read [The Fifth Business] that I forgot what a wonderful writer Robertson Davies can be. So, I went into this one suspecting I might not finish it, but was hooked with the first line, which is pretty good one.

The story is narrated by Dr. Hullah, written in his notebooks as he reminisces over his life to prepare to joust with a journalist. The journalist is an in-law of sorts, a young whipper-snapper, who wants the beyond the curtain on Toronto life. And wants to frame it around the unexpected death of a priest. But Dr. Hullah doesn't want to give the goods, and suspects there was more than meets the eye with the priest's death.

Overall, the book is a meditation on a particular life lived, and all the multitudes show more of interactions and relationships that entails. Davies slips the mystery by you without notice and then yanks the rug from you at the ending revealing it all. Good ol' fashioned literature at its best.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended show less

Robertson Davies is more than just a good storyteller. He is a literate storyteller who fills his novels with references to literature, music, art and science and does so in an engaging way while creating characters that are so interesting that it is difficult to put the book down. At least that has been my experience and my only regret is that I have read so few of his novels.
The Cunning Man is a clever story, part mystery, part bildungsroman, part family saga and a bit of a romance, that keeps you reading to find out how the life of Jonathan Hullah, the cunning and wise doctor at the center of the book, will turn out and how those of the characters whose drama fills his life will also conclude. The doctor is a cunning man in the show more sense used by Robert Burton in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, a seventeenth century compendium of information about the subject of melancholy. Thus the cunning man is a sort of wizard who is as much a doctor of the soul as he is a doctor of the body. From Dr. Hullah's early days learning from a wise Indian woman called Mrs. Smoke through his years in medical school and as medic in the army he develops both expertise in traditional medicine and sometimes mysterious abilities to look into his patients' souls. The result makes for a unique career. Throughout the story the reader is treated to the differences between high and low church Anglicanism, how one deals with a journalist in the family and, most of all, how the cunning man spins his web of masterful medicine through it all. show less

Masterful writing...which is why I read Robertson Davies. Even when characters digress into philosophical discussions, I feel as if I am in on a conversation among friends. Great characters and so many thought-provoking ideas! This one, however, is not my favourite as I found much of the humour rather juvenile.

The entire story is framed as a newspaper interview that causes the elderly narrator, Dr. Jon Hullah, to remember his life through anecdotes and philosophical discussion much of it told in a gossipy tone. He delved into many topics: church, war, sex, family, medicine, even a joke told to him by an acquaintance that he recognized as a retelling of a Rabelais story. He lost my interest in a few spots, but was otherwise fascinating. This is a terrific accomplishment for Davies that came to be his unplanned last hurrah.

I quite liked most of this book. It was witty and clever, very Robertson Davies and very true to Toronto (and Sioux Lookout, for that matter). However, the denouement was disappointing. We know from the first page of the book that there may have been something questionable about the death of poor old Father Hobbes, but when the mystery is finally wrapped up it's too blatant. I was expecting something more subtle and morally ambiguous, worthy of Davies's genius and the gorgeous milieu of St. Aiden's.

An old man reflects on his life. All the grand castles that never quite come together and then tumble down anyway. Beautifully written, a delightful cast of characters. Highly civilized... the cultural elite of Toronto.

Well, I am getting to be a bit of an old man myself. I have projects as wild as the protagonists Anatomy of Fiction. I will just carry on!