The Cunning Man. - book reviews

Christian Century, May 24, 1995 by John Ottenhoff

By Robertson Davies. Viking, 469 pp., $23.95.

THE BODY'S mischiefs ... proceed from the soul: and if the mind be not first satisfied, the body can never be cured." So said Robert Burton, the 17th-century English clergyman and author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a rambling discourse about diseases of the body, mind and soul. Burton's wisdom, style and subject provide inspiration for Robertson Davies's latest ramble. As usual, Davies spins an enticing web of words around a thin plot; in vintage Davies fashion, he makes wonderful, stimulating talk stand as nearly enough for an excellent novel.

Readers who know Davies's best works--the Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders) and the Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus)--will recognize Jonathan Hullah. Like many other Davies narrators, he leaves life in provincial far-northern Ontario for a more refined existence in Toronto. And like many of the earlier first-person narratives, this life journey into knowledge and wisdom leads past a captivating gallery of characters.

Hullah's story centers on his career as a "quodlibetarian physician," one who, like Burton and Paracelsus, "mixed up all sorts of unlikely things to make a unity." His mixture encompasses the holistic folk medicine of Elsie Smoke, the Indian healer of his remote childhood home; Freudian psychoan-alysis; medical training from the University of Toronto; massage therapies, elaborate diagnostic routines; and the exercise of a superior intelligence. His icon is Hermes' intertwined serpents--Knowledge and Wisdom, balanced in an eternal tension, explicated somewhat pedantically by this exchange with Hullah's friend Darcy Dwyer:

Knowledge being science and all

the accumulated lore you have

pumped into you at medical school;

science which keeps changing and

shifting all through your lifetime,

like a snake shedding its old skin--

And Wisdom, with which you

have to apply and temper the whole

business, and fit it to the patient

who sits before you, so that it too

has a serpentine sinuosity and of

course the wisdom which snakes

are--quite mistakenly--supposed

to possess.

But most important, Hullah comes to see the physician as "the priest of our modern, secular world." The priestly nature of Hullah's work becomes especially prominent when he establishes his medical practice in the restored stables of Glebe House on the grounds of St. Aidan's Anglican Church. Religion, for the unchurched Hullah, becomes his "enthusiasm," something to be sampled and savored--along with theater--as pleasures of cosmopolitan Toronto. St. Aidan's, with its Anglican liturgy cranked so high that it threatens to go through the roof and well beyond the 39 Articles, gives Hullah a center encompassing religion and theater, body and soul, reflectiveness and society.

The society of St. Aidan's provides the center of the novel and the small degree of narrative tension that drives it. At St. Aidan's Hullah is reunited with his schoolfriend Charles Iredale, the driving force behind the church's ever ascending liturgy. But the friendship suffers, for they are of "rival priesthoods." The defining moment--and the plot's mystery--occurs when Father Ninian Hobbes dies at the high altar on the morning of Good Friday. The investigating Hullah is waved away by Father Iredale, assisting in the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified, leaving the doctor huffing about the superiority of his kind of priesthood and suspicious about the death. The mystery, such as it is, eventually gets resolved, as does the friendship, but this plot device remains secondary to Davies's philosophical reflections and well-drawn characters.

The narrative is fleshed out through others in the St. Aidan's and Toronto communities. Hugh McWearie, a newspaper editor, provides a worldly counterbalance to Charlie Iredale's ethereal exaggerations; Brochwel Gilmartin and his wife, Nuala Conor--Hullah's only real love--give him another check on reality. Esme Barron, wife of Hullah's godson Conor Gilmartin and reporter for the Colonial Advocate, Provides the ostensible occasion for the retrospective narrative in asking for Hullah's recollections about old Toronto. "The Ladies"--Miss Pansy Freake Todhunter ("Chips") and her companion Emily Raven-Hart, a sculptor--furnish a "salon" for talk and reflection at Glebe House. Chips's letters to a friend in England--recovered by Hullah after the central years of the story--offer narrative relief and occasional insights into how others viewed Hullah.

"He that will avoid trouble must avoid the world," said Burton, and in his old age Hullah comes to recognize that truth. While Davies at times wearies his readers with his incessantly literate talk, slender plots and occasionally intrusive philosophizing, he --nonetheless continues to delight and instruct us about the ways of the world. And while The Cunning Man, written in Davies's 81st year, bears some evidence of retrospection and summing up, this gifted physician of the mind obviously has much yet to tell us.