Davies, you must realize that nobody-literally nobody-is interested in Canada.” * Such an attitude is not unknown in the United States-some years ago an American magazine competition to invent the most boring book title imaginable was won by Canada-Our Neighbor to the North. He was once told by the secretary of a famous London theatrical management to whom he had submitted one of his plays, “Mr. One is that he is Canadian, and the Anglo-American world has only recently begun to take seriously the idea of a Canadian literature. There are several possible reasons why Robertson Davies’s novelistic reputation has ripened so slowly.

The publication of The Lyre of Orpheus, which completes another, as yet unnamed, trilogy, is an important literary event.

His impressively bearded countenance, staring challengingly from the review pages of newspapers and magazines like a reincarnation of Tolstoy (whose birthday he shares, to his obvious pleasure, along with Goethe and Saint Augustine), has become a familiar literary icon.

It put Robertson Davies in that small group of novelists whom anyone professing a serious interest in contemporary fiction has to read. What’s Bred in the Bone, a related, though free-standing novel, was widely praised, and was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1984. I have to confess that the first time Robertson Davies impinged on my own consciousness was when I was asked (by an American journal) to review The Rebel Angels in 1982. Fifth Business, which appeared more than a decade later (1970), and the Deptford trilogy, which it inaugurated, continued in The Manticore (1972) and completed by World of Wonders (1975), enjoyed some success in America, but made little impact in England. This and its sequels, Leaven of Malice (1954) and A Mixture of Frailties (1958), which make up the so-called Salterton trilogy, aroused little interest outside Canada. Born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913, he was an actor (with the London Old Vic company), then a playwright, theater director, essayist, and newspaper editor for many years before (and after) he published his first novel, Tempest-Tost (1951). Robertson Davies started writing novels fairly late in life, and has come into his prime as a novelist at an age when most men are glad if they can summon up enough energy and concentration to read a book, let alone write one.

The deptford trilogy review