Fifth Business

Over the past couple of decades, I've read almost every one of Robertson Davies' (a fellow Canadian!) books, beginning with his Salterton Trilogy, which my editor at Dutton (who is not Canadian) gifted me, mainly because it revolved around an amateur theatre company's chaotic efforts to stage a production of Midsummer Night's Dream (the first novel I published with Dutton dealt with Shakespeare).Naturally I loved the books, especially Davies' droll but elegant, almost Dickensian style. This year I began to crave that sort of writing, so I revisited his novel Fifth Business (also theatre-related), the first book in the Deptford… show more.

Fifth Business is the first of the Deptford Trilogy as the very first line. Deptford is a small village in Canada, by the way. Canadian author, Robertson Davis, wrote this trilogy in the 1970s. It has several things that have influenced me, not least different narrative perspectives.

A young lad throws a snowball and by mistake hits a pregnant woman, who goes into early labour. That has consequences for various Deptford characters. They all have secrets that affect other and are revealed in increments via the different narratives.

Although there is a main narrator—Dunstan Ramsey, a schoolmaster—for Fifth Business and The… show more.