Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)

Fifth Business is the first novel in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, but it can easily be read as a stand alone. I first came across Fifth Business in one of my high school English classes. I admit, at the time, I didn't really like the book, and I didn't understand it. I recall that it's treatment of religion made me a little uncomfortable. 

Having now re-read this book a number of years later, I understand it and I enjoyed it in a way I didn't before. As the novel's introduction notes, Fifth Business is "a novel about moral responsibility."  Davies wanted to explore the question of to what extent a person should be held accountable for the outcome of their actions. The catalyst of the novel is a snowball with a stone in the middle thrown by Percy Boyd Staunton at ten-year old Dunstan Ramsay, which misses him and hits a pregnant Mrs. Dempster in the head. After she gives birth prematurely and becomes "simple-minded," Dunstan feels partly responsible, but Boyd chooses to try and forget that the event ever occurred. An event which occurred by chance sends the two boys down two very different paths which culminate in an ending that appears very much like fate. What roles chance and fate ultimately play in this novel, I'll leave you to decide for yourself. I'm not sure I know yet myself. 

It's not the initial question of moral responsibility that intrigues me so much, as Davies' treatment of religion and myth. One of my favourite passages is, I would say, also one of the most thought provoking passages in the whole novel: "religion and Arabian Nights were true in the same way. (Later I was able to say that they were both psychologically rather than literally true, and that psychological truth was really as important in its own way as historical verification"(p.64). The narrator, Dunstan Ramsay, seems to see religion, myth and history as--in a way-- one in the same. The meaning we see in history, in religion, in our personal lives and in our interactions with others are only what we make them to be, or need them to be. However, we cannot always control meaning or control our interpretations of events. 

I would highly recommend this classic work of Canadian literature to anyone who hasn't yet read it. The Penguin Modern Classics edition if lovely and fairly inexpensive.  Plus, Fifth Business is a good introductory work for any any reader looking to explore classic Canadian literature.