Solitary Voyage

FIFTH BUSINESS by Robertson Davies. 308 pages. Viking. $6.95.

It is a secure kind of pleasure to begin a novel by Canadian Writer Robertson Davies. This is not because the reader knows what will happen--Davies does not write formula fiction--but because he is serenely sure of what will not happen. The author will not hunt snarks, nor plant a forest of symbols and then get lost in it. Nor will he fail to have some compelling reason to write rather than remain silent.

There should be no dismay, therefore, when Davies introduces as his hero an elderly hagiographer who has spent most of his life as a master at a Canadian boys' school. Dunstan Ramsay is a solitary man but not a recluse, one of those singlehanded voyagers who is happy enough to socialize in port, but who never spends much time there. The seas he is driven to cross are strange and not much traveled; his lifelong obsession is to comprehend the condition of sainthood.

Ramsay's interest in saintly matters begins during boyhood in a tiny Canadian village when he meets the young wife of a hard-shell Baptist preacher. She is thought to be simple by the townspeople, and proves it to the villagers' angry satisfaction by copulating with a tramp, apparently out of pure charity, and then calmly explaining--when they are caught together--that she did it because "He was very civil. And he wanted it so badly." After that her husband keeps her tied up. She takes little notice of this restraint and continues to exist in untroubled innocence, or so it seems to young Ramsay. Events continue to set her apart. When his brother stops breathing during a kidney illness, she succeeds--so Ramsay believes--in raising him from the dead by prayer. And later, when Ramsay is wounded at Passchendaele during World War I, a vision of her as the Immaculate Conception seems to appear to him.

Chilly Virtue. The rest of the story deserves not to be summarized. It is enough to say that it is wholly absorbing, and leads Ramsay to comprehension of his own nature--which is not saintly. Nor is it his nature, as he once thought, to play "Fifth Business"--a special catalyst's role, as the author explains, not hero or heroine, confidant or villain, but "nonetheless essential to bring about the recognition or the denouement, in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style." Ramsay, the eccentric schoolmaster, has played this role in the lives of friends. In the end, completing his solitary voyage, he assumes his proper role as hero.

The author's fiction resembles the work of such writers as Louis Auchincloss, James Gould Cozzens and C.P. Snow, in that--whatever the theme--in the telling, reason's rule is absolute. This can be a chilly virtue as well as a limiting one, but the limits are generous in Davies' case. His perceptions are wry and tough. The description of one of Ramsay's friends gives the flavor: "He was the quintessence of the Jazz Age . . . It was characteristic of Boy throughout his life that he was always the quintessence of something that somebody else had recognized and defined." Davies' minor characters--in particular an outrageous old Jesuit--are excellent. His work, including three other novels, six plays and much criticism, deserves to be known better.

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