Fifth Business (1970)
Written by Roberston Davies
Who has also done The Manticore and World of Wonders
(all part of the Deptford Trilogy)
Characters
Dunstan Ramsay
Mary Demptser
Paul Demptser
Amasa Dempster
Percy Boyd Staunton
Leola Cruikshank
Diana Marfleet
Eisengrim
Lieselotte Vitzlipützli
Introduction
The first installment of Canadian author Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy is a story of the life of
the narrator, Dunstan Ramsay written as a memoir. This novel differs in style from its
contemporaries because its focus is on the character himself, where the events he encounters are
significant only in their impact on his development. It is Davies' best-known novel, and considered
his finest; the New York Times declared it “a marvelously enigmatic novel, elegantly written and
driven by irresistible narrative force.”
A book of fatalism and the butterfly effect, Dunstan sees the events of his life as intertwined in
inevitable; he is destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide.
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.
www.amazon.com
www.wikipedia.org
My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock
p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and
seven months old.
I am able to date the occasion with complete certainty because that
afternoon I had been sledding with my lifelong friend and enemy
Percy Boyd Staunton, and we had quarreled, because his fine new
Christmas sled would not go as fast as my old one.
p1
Reviews
Fifth Business Rewview by Matthew Krichman
July 18, 2002 www.amazon.com
Fifth Business, the first installment of the Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, is without doubt
the best novel that I had never heard of. Davies’ prose and narrative voice rival Evelyn Waugh's
Brideshead Revisited in elegance, humor, and style. And his characters and plot development, so
rich, absorbing, and at once triumphant and tragic, put this fine novel in the same class as
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
The term 'Fifth Business', as Davies describes, refers to the role in an opera, usually played by a
man, which has no opposite of the other sex. While only a supporting character, he is essential to the
plot, for he often knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when
all seems lost, or may even be the cause of someone's death. In this novel, Dunstan Ramsay plays
this role, and he is in maginificent form. Though he narrates the novel, and is intimately entwined in
the lives of all its characters, he somehow manages to remain slightly in the background as a passive
observer of others. It is through his eyes that we witness the rise of Boy Staunton, his childhood
friend from the small Canadian town of Deptford. While Dunny goes off to the war where he is
seriously wounded, and later becomes a boarding school master and expert on the history of saints,
Boy makes his fortune in the sugar business and eventually pursues a career in politics. Dunny,
whose soft-spoken charm, honesty, and self-reflection become clear through his narration, serves as
an admirable foil to Boy, whose drive and ambition are unrestrained by a sense of morality, duty, or
altruism.
But the novel is far more complex than a simple study of two contrasting characters. Davies' cast
is rich and diverse, and their lives intertwine fluidly, though often in surprising ways. There is Mrs.
Dempster, who in the opening pages is struck by a snowball thrown by Boy and intended for Dunny,
and is rendered "simple" after the subsequent premature birth of her son Paul. And Liesl, the
magician's manager, a strong-willed and sexually aggressive woman, hardened by life but wise in
the ways of the world, proves to be an admirable rival for Dunny as astute observer of others.
Narrated in the form of a letter to Dunny's headmaster, the novel maintains a strong sense of
plain honesty throughout. It is a remarkable novel, and a shock that Davies has remained relatively
obscure in this country.
Fifth Business by Anonymous
November 13, 1999 www.amazon.com
I had never heard of Robertson Davies until I discovered "Fifth Business", the first installment of
the "Deptford Trilogy", from a recommended book list and what a great reading experience it turned
out to be.
Davies writes in a style highly reminiscent of the great late 19th and early 20th century writers.
Strongly narrative, the novel is richly multilayered in its exploration of ideas and themes. At its most
basic level, it is the story of the sensitive but oddly passive Dunstan Ramsey, the novel's protagonist,
whose life is contrasted with his pragmatic and successful friend, Boy Staunton and his women.
Whilst Dunstan seems content to live life as a school master, observing rather than participating,
Boy makes waves and becomes a hugely successful figure in business and politics. But more
fascinating is the early traces of "magical realism" used by Davies in the Mary Dempster (the "foolsaint") episode, which manifests the nature of Dunstan's conscience (contrasting with the lack
thereof in Boy) as well as his belief in the power of magic and imagination.
In the development of this secondary plot line, Davies employs a technique that hints at "magical
realism" but wields his craft with such confidence and aplomb that the effect can only be described
as dazzling. Dunstan's feeling of responsibility towards Mary and her son Paul is brought to a
beautiful conclusion. The shock ending for Boy smacks of poetic justice, leaving the question
metaphysically open ended. Boy may be the protagonist on the world's stage and Dunstan only "fifth
business", but who's ultimately the more valuable human being ? Davies has written a brilliant and
enchanting novel. For sure I'll be checking out the next two installments of his trilogy. 
The Grand Illusionist by Diane Cole February 18, 1998
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/18/books/the-grand-illusionist.html?pagewanted=1
When the Canadian writer Robertson Davies died at the age of 82 last December, readers around
the globe mourned… William Robertson Davies, [grew up] in the remote Canadian town of
Thamesville, Ontario, a rural hamlet too small and insular, one might suppose, to make much of an
impact on a delicate child with a taste for rhymes and music. But, as Judith Skelton Grant shows us
in her scrupulously detailed biography, "Robertson Davies: Man of Myth," even though the author's
life never proved as dramatic as his fiction, it provided abundant material for the imagination.
As editor of the local newspaper, Da-vies's father, Rupert, was privy to enough colorful gossip to
paint a vivid panorama of the town's activities at dinner each evening, and in doing so to instill in his
son a lifelong curiosity -- and skepticism -- about the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the small town
of which they were a part, and by extension the world at large.
And so this bustling village landscape -- bounded by an abandoned rail-yard gravel pit on one
side and a canning factory on the other, peopled by neighbors ranging from the wildly eccentric to
the socially pretentious and enlivened by assorted tramps and displaced Indians passing through -eventually became the model for the fictional town of Deptford and a central character in itself of
Davies's masterpiece, the Deptford Trilogy.
In real life, this was the essentially friendly, if not untroubled, womb of early childhood, Ms.
Grant writes. Davies, the youngest by several years of three brothers, had not yet discovered he had
been the unwanted child of older parents whose marriage already had begun to disintegrate. The
fictionally transformed Thamesville landscape became the perfect jumping-off place for characters
who can be seen, in the three Deptford novels of the 1970's ("Fifth Business," "The Manticore" and
"World of Wonders"), as various psychological guises of Davies himself: Dunstan Ramsay, a fussy
schoolmaster maimed both physically and spiritually in World War I; Paul Dempster, the cruelly
stigmatized son of a rigidly religious father and na vely erring mother who runs away and transforms
himself into the grand illusionist Magnus Eisengrim; and Boy Staunton, the snobbish rich man's son
whose ruthlessness leads, in equal parts, to destruction and despair.
By contrast to this lost world of childhood, the larger but in many ways more isolated town of
Renfrew, to which the Davies family moved when the upwardly mobile Rupert purchased that
town's paper in 1919, impressed itself on Davies as inhabited by "a bitter, evil, ingrown, ignorant
pack of ruffians." In addition to the bullies who lay in wait for him at school, he could just as well
have been speaking about his emotionally detached mother, who, he now saw, possessed little
warmth to give him; about his increasingly work-obsessed father, who, aside from spinning vivid
tales of his own childhood past, set aside increasingly little time for family life; and about his
rivalrous older brothers, who, when they came home at all, enjoyed taunting him…
It is unfair, of course, to reduce any novelist's work to selective slices of his psyche, but Davies
himself admitted to the biographical sources of his imagination. Indeed, what he excelled in was a
kind of autobiographical fiction that transformed the emotional hurts and physical settings from his
past into highly suspenseful entertainments with often fantastical plots. At the same time, Davies's
longtime fascination with the works of Carl Jung brought to his novels a dark and distinctively
introspective vision. His novel "The Manticore," for instance, is the only work of fiction I can think
of that presents an entirely believable dramatization of the internal process of analysis -- and what's
more, within the context of a rippingly good yarn. From a Jungian point of view, one could say,
Davies used his personal myths and archetypes to probe the possibilities of human good and evil, but
always with a wickedly humorous wink.
There are few, if any, juicy revelations in Ms. Grant's biography. Yet she shows that behind the
distinctive long white beard that gave Davies, in his last years, the appearance of a slightly rakish
Kris Kringle, there hid a magician as gifted as the master illusionist he created in his fictional
persona, Magnus Eisengrim. The 11 novels of Robertson Davies are evidence of artistic magic of the
highest order.
Allusions, References and Noteable Notes
Davies, then being an avid student of Carl Jung's ideas, deploys them in Fifth Business. Characters are
clear examples of Jungian archetypes and events demonstrate Jung's idea of synchronicity (the
experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.
To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance)
www.wikipedia.org
Magician archetype represents personal power in the world. He searches out the fundamental laws of
science and/or metaphysics to understand how to transform situations, influence people, and make
visions into realities. If the Magician can overcome the temptation to use power manipulatively, it
galvanizes energies for good
http://www.herowithin.com/arch101.html
Rebirth archetype can be represented by various symbols representing life or cleansing.
In The Golden Bough Frazer identifies shared practices and mythological beliefs between primitive
religions and modern religions. Frazer argues that the death-rebirth myth is present in almost all cultural
mythologies, and is acted out in terms of growing seasons and vegetation. The myth is symbolized by
the death (i.e. final harvest) and rebirth (i.e. spring) of the god of vegetation. As an example, Frazer cites
the Greek myth of Persephone, who was taken to the Underworld by Hades. Her mother Demeter, the
goddess of the harvest, was so sad that she struck the world with fall and winter. While in the
underworld Persephone ate 6 of the 12 pomegranate seeds given to her by Hades. Because of what she
ate, she was forced to spend half the year, from then on, in the underworld, representative of autumn and
winter, or the death in the death-rebirth myth. The other half of the year Persephone was permitted to be
in the mortal realm with Demeter, which represents spring and summer, or the rebirth in the deathrebirth myth… With the same death-rebirth myth that Frazer sees as being representative of the growing
seasons and agriculture as a point of comparison, a Jungian analysis envisions the death-rebirth
archetype as a “symbolic expression of a process taking place not in the world but in the mind. That
process is the return of the ego to the unconscious—a kind of temporary death of the ego—and its reemergence, or rebirth, from the unconscious”
www.wikipedia.org
Robertson Davies has referred to himself as a "moralist" and to his novels as "a moralist's novels." The
central question that led him to write the Deptford trilogy was a moral question: "to what extent is a man
responsible for the outcome of his actions, and how early in life does the responsibility begin?" (One
Half 66). But this concern with morality raises the issue of authority: who or what defines moral truth?
Solipsistic view is the philosophical idea that one's own mind is all that exists
http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol12_1/&filename=LoVerso.htm
Davies and Dunstan here are at pains to illustrate to us just how fluid the concept of historical fact really
is, and that it is not so distinct from the suppositions of mythic thinking. Dunstan questions the extent
that he can provide an accurate of the events of his childhood or his participation in WW1 campaigns,
because what he recalls is surely distinct from the ‘consensually accepted reality’
One aspect of this blurred distinction between myth and history is Ramsay’s lifelong preoccupation with
the lives of the Saints. The fantastic nature of their stories were always grounded in actual events, but
their miracles were given attention and focus based on the psychosocial attitudes and needs of the day,
so that what the public wanted had a large measure of influence over what became the accepted canon.
The book's title was explained by the author as a theatrical term, a character essential to the action but
not a principal… Only in 1979, when the book's Norwegian translator failed to find the citation did
Davies admit it was his invention.
Saint Dunstan was a 10th C. Archbishop of Canterbury, canonized as a saint in 1029. Dunstan served as
an important minister of state to several English kings. He was the most popular saint in England for
nearly two centuries, having gained fame for the many stories of his greatness. Adding to Dunstan's
myth was his legendary cunning in dealing with the Devil – the story relates how Dunstan nailed a
horseshoe to the Devil's hoof when he was asked to re-shoe the Devil's horse. This caused the Devil
great pain, and Dunstan only agreed to remove the shoe and release the Devil after he promised never to
enter a place where a horseshoe is over the door. This is claimed as the origin of the lucky horseshoe.
He functions as the patron saint of goldsmiths and silversmiths, as he worked as a blacksmith, painter,
and jeweler. His Feast Day is May 19th, which is why the date year on hallmarks runs from May 19th to
May 18th, not the calendar year. St Dunstan's—the charity that provides support, rehabilitation, and
respite care to blind ex-service personnel of the British Armed Forces—is named after him, as are many
churches all over the world
Faust or Faustus (Latin for "auspicious" or "lucky", but also German for "fist") is the protagonist of a
classic German legend who makes a pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge. The meaning of the
word and name has been reinterpreted through the ages. "Faust" (and the adjective "Faustian") has taken
on a connotation distinct from its original use, and is often used today to describe an unsavory,
ultimately self-destructive arrangement; the proverbial "deal with the devil". It can also refer to a
unquenchable thirst for knowledge.
www.wikipedia.org
Key Quotations
Percy had been throwing snowballs at me, from time to time, and I had ducked them all; I had a boy's
sense of when a snowball was coming, and I knew Percy. I was sure that he would try to land one last,
insulting snowball between my shoulders before I ducked into our house. (Ch 1)
Falling, she burst into nervous tears, and suddenly there she was, on the ground, with her husband
kneeling before her, holding her in his arms and speaking to her in terms of endearment that were
strange and embarrassing to me; I had never heard married people - or any people - speak in
unashamedly loving words before. I knew that I was watching a 'scene,' and my parents had always
warned against scenes as very serious breaches of propriety.(Ch 1)
But what I knew then was that nobody--not even my mother—was to be trusted in a strange world that
showed very little of itself on the surface. (36)
...being young and unwilling to recognize that there was anything I did not, or could not know, I decided
that this unknown aspect must be called madness. (53)
"So you provide romance," I said."
"I provide something that strengthens faith". (132)
...because we love the saint and want him to be more like ourselves, we attribute some imperfection to
him. (172)
If you think her a saint, she is a saint to you.(174)
Working on these illusions was delightful but destructive of my character. I was aware that I was
recapturing the best of my childhood; my imagination had never known such glorious freedom...I knew
that something was terribly wrong with Dunstan Ramsay. (215)
I'm simply trying to recover something of the totality of your life. Don't you want to possess is as a
whole--the bad with the good? (264)
Discussion Questions
Text as Story
 What is the role of religion in Deptford? How does this relate to characterization?
 Morality – does silence make a witness implicit to a crime?
 Guilt and its debilitating effects.
 Search for self – are we defined by the events in our lives or do we create the reality around us?
Text as Technique
 Memoir as biased method for storytelling – distinction between myth and history. How does
Dunstan’s motivation for writing his memoir help to influence our interpretation of his story?
 Davies’ approach to chronology – why is the story presented in this order?
 Name changes are frequent throughout – who does Davies ‘transform’ what are the implications?
Key Quotes/Selections
Quote
Scene
Significance/Relevance