Tempest-Tost (Salterton Trilogy, volume 1) by Robertson Davies

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tempest-Tost (Salterton Trilogy, volume 1) by Robertson Davies

Comments

[viktor_haag]

a respectable city that offers a variety of civilized amenities: a university, two cathedrals (Anglican for the respectable Saltertonians, Catholic for the rest), a university, and a prison

Rhetorical flourish? Or unintentionally doubled list-item?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Unintentional and not fixable from my phone.

[viktor_haag]

I'm pretty sure that the actual reason for not being in the curriculum is Davies' tendency to include sex and frank bodily function descriptions in his stories, and not because of his humour. It's also possible that the WO English department just didn't care for Davies much; I know that Fifth Business was on the syllabus at some of the city-schools in our board around the time we were attending (because friends of mine reported reading it as part of their CanLit curriculum).

[flemmings]

All the Canlit fiction I read in those days (never for school, although give the nuns their due, they did include Abraham Klein) was set on the prairies or small town presumably-Ontario, and involved grim Scots descendants being cribbed cabined and confined by their geography and society.

(Montreal-set novels weren't much better from a female point of view.)

[(Anonymous)]

Point of information: Bear, no leading article.

[jreynolds197]

Fifth Business was on the curriculum when I was going to high school in the late 1980s.

Went and read the rest of the trilogy, then many of Davies other works due to that.

Only his last two books (Murther and Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man) were complete disappointments¹.

¹ To me, anyway.

[viktor_haag]

I agree. I loved the first two books of the Cornish Trilogy, far more, in fact, than his earlier work, but the drop in quality with The Lyre Of Orpheus was shocking to me. I tried Murther and Walking Spirits, it was no better, and I thought, oh that's sad, but I guess I'd best not proceed any further. 8(

[viktor_haag]

The book (to which James refers) is thusly named (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_(novel)), and rather notorious in CanLit circles (unjustly notorious, in my opinion).

For those interested in more background on the book than Wikipedia can provide, there was a fairly recent CBC Ideas podcast on the subject of the novel, and its importance in the CanLit canon.

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps the rule was simply that Canadian literature must be located far from the Canadian student in question. A friend from Winnipeg was required to study "Leaven of Malice" in high school English in the early 70s.

He duly learned to hate it and I had serious trouble getting him to read "Fifth Business".

William Hyde

[oursin]

Mmmmmmm, Robertson Davies. I keep being tempted to a re-read, but once I get started I tend to re-read The Whole Lot and might even include the essays and letters... itsa vortex

Recentlyish read Alice Degan, From All False Doctrine (2014), which, although reviewers were invoking D Sayers and C Williams, struck me as having a lot of Davies in its DNA: It's set in Toronto. University. Anglican clergymen. Occult goings-on. Dodgy academics. Forgery. I rest my case.

[(Anonymous)]

High school me speaking: CanLit? What is this 'CanLit' you speak of?

I did read this book in the 90s, when I was part of a book club, and enjoyed it immensely. I meant to get around to the other books but never did.

-Awesome Aud

[jsburbidge]

We had the second book in the Salterton Trilogy, Leaven of Malice, in Grade 13; my daughter had Fifth Business in Grade 12.

By Grade 13 I had already read the whole series long before, as well as the whole Deptford Trilogy (which was the limit of current Davies at the time).

Davies certainly had experience of amateur theatre; he was one of the founders of the Peterborough Theatre Guild. That was, however, after 5his book was published. (The cathedral organist, who plays a larger role in the later books along with Solly Bridgetower, was supposedly partly modelled on Graham George from Kingston.)

[rwpikul]

Well it could be like Waterloo, which does offer a university and a university.

Toronto offers a university, a university, a university and a university.

[(Anonymous)]

Davies started the novel as a play, one of many he had written up to that point, most of which were performed, broadcast on CBC, then not heard of again. Luckily for us, he decided it would work better as a novel.

He'd been involved in theatre since his days at the Old Vic in the late 1930s, so there wasn't much that could happen in a production that he hadn't seen.

William Hyde