Leaven of Malice (Salterton Trilogy, volume 2) by Robertson Davies

[james_davis_nicoll]

Leaven of Malice (Salterton Trilogy, volume 2) by Robertson Davies

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

The detail of geology being sorted into the arts because it is natural philosophy feels like it had a real world example.

[oursin]

bad weather, problematic families and worse economics nature is indifferent to human desire.

In my defense, quite a lot of CanLit and Canadian history reads like it was meant as hilarious parody while being entirely sober in intent.

Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm, famed satire on the British rural misery genre, in 1953 published Fort of the Bear about a Brit aristo who goes with his family and assorted friends and retainers to the wilds of Canada (it's the 1920s? were they that wild by then?). Unfortunately it is not in the same comic vein.

[james_davis_nicoll]

There is rather a lot of Canada and if you picked your destination carefully, it would be easy to die unnoticed surrounded by wilderness. See, for example, Paddle Across the Arctic, inexplicably not titled HOW NOT TO PADDLE ACROSS THE ARCTIC.

Various accounts by CanLit authors of travels in Canada suggest to me that if where you were going wasn't on a rail line, getting from A to B even within Ontario could be challenging, right up to about the time my parents emigrated here.

[james_davis_nicoll]

I don't know if it is still true but in the 1980s Nova Scotia had one of the continent's best search and rescue organizations, because people went missing in NS at a disproportionate rate. Emergency Canada was at a loss to explain why this was.

[oursin]

People can get lost anywhere, pretty much: I think I linked recently to reports of people who get into difficulties not all that far from civilisation in the Lake District, Wales, or parts of Scotland, simply because they are inadequately prepared for the conditions pertaining. Or listening to the weather forecast.

[philrm]

For reasons that are entirely unclear to me, because I loved Davies' Cornish trilogy*, I only recently acquired the omnibus of The Deptford Trilogy, although I haven't yet read found the time to read it. Your reviews make it clear that I also should read the Salterton Trilogy, as it sounds like very much My Kind of Thing.

*I'd rate What's Bred in the Bone as the best of a very fine lot.