Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the
hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated
with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man''s
land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his
story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a
perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around
him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events
as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a
small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous.
Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by
a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another
aspect of the real.
Robertson Davies, novelist, playwright,
literary critic and essayist, was born in 1913 in Thamesville,
Ontario. He was educated at Queen's University, Toronto, and
Balliol College, Oxford. Whilst at Oxford he became interested in
the theatre and from 1938 until 1940 he was a teacher and actor at
the Old Vic in London. He subsequently wrote a number of plays. In
1940 he returned to Canada, where he was literary editor of
Saturday Night, an arts, politics and current affairs
journal, until 1942, when he became editor and later publisher of
the Peterborough Examiner. Several of his books, including
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks and The Table Talk of
Samuel Marchbanks, had their origins in an editorial column.
In 1962 he was appointed Professor of English at the University of
Toronto, and in 1963 was appointed the first Master of the
University's Massey College. He retired in 1981, but remained
Master Emeritus and Professor Emeritus. He held honorary doctorates
from twenty-six universities in the UK, the USA and Canada, and he
received numerous awards for his work, including the
Governor-General's Award for The Manticore in 1973. It is
as a writer of fiction that Robertson Davies achieved international
recognition, with such books as The Salterton Trilogy
(Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, winner of the Leacock Award
for Humour, and A Mixture of Frailties); The Deptford
Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of
Wonders); The Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, What's
Bred in the Bone, shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, and
The Lyre of Orpheus); Murther & Walking
Spirits; and The Cunning Man. His other work includes
One Half of Robertson Davies, The Enthusiasms of Robertson
Davies, Robertson Davies: The Well-Tempered Critic, The Papers of
Samuel Marchbanks, High Spirits, A Voice from the Attic and
The Merry Heart, a posthumous collection of autobiography,
lectures and essays. Many of his books are published by
Penguin.
Robertson Davies died in December 1995. Malcolm Bradbury
described him as 'one of the great modern novelists', and in its
obituary The Times wrote: 'Davies encompassed all the great
elements of life...His novels combined deep seriousness and
psychological inquiry with fantasy and exuberant mirth.'
