Following his father’s death and a methodical bit of rapid soul-searching, David has himself flown to Zurich and signs up for analysis and treatment at the Jung Institute, believing that he is likely to be on the cusp of madness. This time, David “Davey” Staunton is the narrator and protagonist, the former pupil of Dunstan Ramsey and the child of sugar magnate Boy Staunton. Published in 1972, The Manticore – like Fifth Business – takes a metatextual justification for its structure and, again, allows a privileged, chauvinist man to narrate. If I was a braver progressive reader or willing to reduce my book collection sizeably again (a more painful loss from my annus horribilis (2017) than both the cat ( sweet, shy, Diana) and the five figure sum I sunk (pun intended) on a structurally unsound boat), then I’d never read a book like this again.īut I keep coming back to them, from time to time, because they’re reassuring, they’re easy, they’re HOME. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s of a novelistic type of which there are tens of thousands of solid examples. This means, alas, that The Deptford Trilogy is doomed to a peripheral position in the world of letters: it is of a time now gone, and a contemporary reader (at least one with similar politics to me) is unlikely to find much here to laud.

Something fast, something frothy, something I won’t be comparing subconsciously with James Baldwin, something with no pretensions to greatness because its content implies that by discussing “great men” it is inherently “great literature”. All in, a typically middlebrow and relaxingly escapist read, far from the contemporary horrors of COVID-19 and the continuing global rise of the far right (which, let’s be honest, has in no circumstances changed because Joe Biden scraped an election victory in the USA: the curve is a little shallower, rather than reversed).įor the continued need of escape from the Now, I decided to see out freezing January 2021 with the rest of this trilogy. Last Summer, I had my first experience of reading a Canadian novel by a middle class white man, and – reluctantly, shamefully, redflaggedly – I enjoyed it a lot.Īs I wrote in an uncharacteristically focused blog about that novel – Fifth Business, the first part of Robertson Davies‘ The Deptford Trilogy – it has all those hallmarks of the classic dead white male novelist: the stakes are low, the sexism is rampant, everyone is rich, most characters beyond the central men are sketches at best and scrawls as standard.

The deptford trilogy robertson davies