Fourth Book: Fifth Business

That title is so neat that I must almost surrender my regret at not having read more this month. And I think this is a fitting book to end the month on, too. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. Absolutely my favorite book of the year so far. It's so good. I can't believe it ended where it did. Katie, please give me more right away.

It came to me in a rather circuitous fashion, as Katie registered it on book crossing, and also said there that she was passing it on to me by way of Rachel. However, Rachel forgot about it, and I did not know that she had done so until I read it in her book crossing information. I was immediately excited. While I don't remember many of the details of the Cornish trilogy of Davies' which Katie and I read freshman year as part of the Arthur class, I do remember the overall feeling of the books, and my sense every time I come across that big volume I have of all three that it is something wonderful. I also remember some weird erotic scene involving jam. I'm sure there's more I have tucked away in my brain related to those books than that, but it sort of jumped out at me just now. Oh, anyway, I was rooting around on Rachel's floor looking for the plug to this very computer, in fact, and in the course of finding it I located the elusive Fifth Business.

Hooray! It is so, so good! Very intelligent without being inaccessible, and very eventful and colorful without being unpleasantly lurid. Robertson Davies is just... great. One of those writers whose so consistently and truly excellent that I just am full of delight and sort of awed hope that someday I could write that way, perhaps... I don't know, but it's a hope.

The characters are so consistently detailed and interesting and great. Dunstable/Dunstan was a very engaging narrator, and all the supporting characters were fascinating and I just loved the cosmology he was building... this sort of practical, psychological mysticism... well, it was fascinating, as I said. And the plot was supremely engaging and great and made me gasp and laugh and occasionally speak aloud to the book. It was so exciting and..surprising, every time I thought I knew where it was going it went somewhere else entirely, without seeming at all ridiculous. I was especially interested in the idea of rebirth, and the whole fifth business idea, and the way in which his ideas and worldview grew and changed over time. I think in his very narration Dunstable illustrates the points he makes about how we do and don't change from childhood to adulthood and so on. I think I will need to read it again sometime, actually, because there are ideas and plot points I would like to revisit at another time.

But now the president is about to give his state of the union, so perhaps I should cut this short. There are some quotes I want to put in, and other things to discuss, but I'll either make another post or add to this one later.