PUZZLING CASE

By Paul Gray

ROBERTSON DAVIES' NEW NOVEL opens with a mystery: an elderly priest of the Anglican Church of Canada drops dead during a particularly dramatic moment in the Good Friday services. Very near its end, The Cunning Man (Viking; 469 pages; $23.95) provides an explanation for this long-ago demise, although it is doubtful that any reader simply intent on finding out whodunit will still be turning these pages. The overriding appeal of a Davies book, as his legion of fans will attest, rarely rides on something as mundane as suspense. Instead, Canada's foremost living author, now 81, entertains with an old-fashioned fictional mixture that he seems to have invented anew: keen social observations delivered with wit, intelligence and free-floating philosophical curiosity.

The narrator and hero of The Cunning Man is Jonathan Hullah, M.D., who was present at St. Aidan's Church in Toronto when Father Ninian Hobbes collapsed and died. Also on the altar that day was Hullah's old friend from prep-school days, Father Charles Iredale, who shooed the physician away when he approached the stricken celebrant. "We were members of two rival priesthoods," Hullah muses, "he the Man of God and I the Man of Science."

Hullah's memory of this scene is rekindled when he agrees to a series of interviews with an attractive young female reporter who plans a series of articles on "The Toronto That Used to Be." In order to distinguish what he wants to tell her from what he wishes to keep to himself--including his misgivings about Father Hobbes' death--Hullah begins writing notes to himself in a case book, an old-fashioned physician's tool. As his jottings mount up, Hullah notes to himself, "I really must put on the brakes or this Case Book, which I in-tend only as an aide-mamoire, will turn into one of those German Bildungsromanen, about the growth of a human spirit."

Which is exactly what The Cunning Man is: a leisurely look back at the formation of an intriguing character and unusual doctor. ("My nose," he asserts, "is one of my principal diagnostic instruments.") "We old men are garrulous," Hullah says in passing, and he seems in no greater hurry to end his life story than he does to stop living. He recounts his pilgrimage from a rural Canadian village through school and World War II service in the medical corps with cool good humor and plenty of diverting asides ("What has nature produced more totally ravishing than a beautiful, witty soprano?").

Hullah fell in love but once, at age 24, and then lost her, at least formally, when the woman married one of his closest school friends. But they maintained an intermittent affair, and Hullah now believes that her grown son may also be his. What, he wonders, should he do with this suspicion? "My son. Do I look on him with dimmed eyes, yearning to embrace him and claim him as my own? No, I don't. Things are very well as they are."

This cool, ironic tone may puzzle readers who have grown accustomed to the exhibitionist screeches and gibberings of contemporary fictional narrators. But Davies has never minded appearing old-fashioned in the absence of a preferable alternative. At one point Hullah describes a typical novel by John Galsworthy, "full of controlled social consciousness, detailed but not probing investigation of character, and unimpeachable sanity, justice and compassion." A better self-review would be hard to imagine.