The Cunning Man

Starred review from January 30, 1995
Admirers of Davies who may have felt somewhat of a falling off in his last two books can be reassured: The Cunning Man is a superb return to the high form of the Deptford trilogy and What's Bred in the Bone. It's a novel in which Davies' clear-sighted humanism, irony and grasp of character are on vivid display. The hero, Dr. Jonathan Hullah, is a Toronto doctor of decidedly unorthodox opinions and practice who regales the reader with an account of his family and educational history, and his relationships with a group that includes a noble priest who dies mysteriously at the altar, a far-from-noble one who quite justifiably declines into drink and despair, an untidy Scottish journalist who is a splendid foil to Hullah, and a lesbian couple who offer the provincial Canadian city the equivalent of a Parisian salon on the basis of cucumber sandwiches and cream cakes. Everything revolves around a church much more Roman, in its rituals and music, than it should be; an apparent miracle; and a nosy woman reporter. Davies's command of both his material and his elegant first-person narration is absolute. He achieves a remarkable sense of uncloying elegy in his vision of a group of people who are far more complicated than they appear, yet always utterly believable. To call a book the work of an infinitely civilized mind might seem starchy; to add that it is also wonderfully funny, poignant and never less than totally engrossing should redress the balance.