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.

Admirers of the late actor James Mason will delight in the narrative gifts of Frederick Davidson, who also projects a delicious irony in the instrument of his voice. And what better material to give expression to that talent than Robertson Davies's, Canada's most prodigious ironist. THE CUNNING MAN is dense, difficult material full of Davies's usual digressions and narrative complications. But Davidson's reading never flags. He remains buoyant and wry throughout, a witty companion to have on a long journey. The book's protagonist, Jonathan Hullah, shares those qualities himself as he recounts his life as a Canadian physician with a large appetite for the mysterious, the miraculous, the spiritual and, most particularly, the ironic. M.O. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine