Fifth Business By Robertson Davies

Getting Through Robertson Davies Fifth Business

Fifth Business is the first novel in Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy, published in 1970. It follows Dunstable Ramsay, an aging man who decides to write his autobiography after his wife dies. The book is set primarily in the fictional town of Deptford, Ontario, and deals with guilt, identity, and the way people construct personal mythology to make sense of their lives. The book runs about 550 pages. It's dense with references — classical literature, Christianity, Gnosticism, folk traditions, Canadian history. Davies writes with a kind of deliberate heaviness, and if you're expecting a fast read, you'll be frustrated. The pacing is slow by design. Ramsay keeps circling back to the same events, re-examining them from different angles, which mirrors how a real person processes trauma and memory. That's intentional. The book rewards rereading more than it rewards rushing.

Fifth Business By Robertson Davies — What Actually Happens

The inciting incident happens when Ramsay is a boy. He receives a Christmas letter reporting that a girl named Marie Cutten has drowned. He assumes it's one of his classmates and forwards the letter, but the letter is misdirected. Instead, it reaches a woman named Mrs. Child, who believes the drowning refers to her own daughter, Magnus Olga. She confronts Ramsay, leading to a confrontation that sends Magnus Olga into a mental breakdown. Later she survives but lives as a recluse. This event haunts Ramsay for the rest of the book. What follows is Ramsay's attempt to understand that childhood moment — not just what happened, but what it meant, how it shaped him, and whether he was morally responsible. The narrative weaves through his childhood, his education, his time teaching, his studies of folklore, and his fascination with figures like Saint Peter Damian, Saint Sebastian, and the concept of the fool-saint. Davies layers in extensive digressions that are themselves part of the novel's method: Ramsay is a man obsessed with finding patterns, with connecting seemingly random events into a coherent narrative. The twist most readers encounter is that Ramsay is deeply unreliable. He constructs his own mythology around a series of coincidences that may or may not mean what he thinks they mean. The book is about the act of meaning-making itself. Davies isn't just telling a story; he's showing you a mind trying to turn chaos into order.

I've taught this novel multiple times, and the pattern I keep seeing is that students miss the structural trick on first read. They take Ramsay's interpretations at face value. The book is designed to resist that. Ramsay claims certain events are fated or symbolic, and the reader is meant to sit with doubt about whether those connections are real or projected. I've found that the most productive approach is to keep a separate margin for your own objections — when Ramsay says something is clearly a sign, write down why it might not be. The book's meaning lives in that tension between Ramsay's certainty and your skepticism.

Why This Book Is Harder Than It Looks

Most people approach Fifth Business as a character study of a peculiar man. That reading is correct but incomplete. The book is really about mythological archetypes and how ordinary lives get retrofitted with sacred narratives. Ramsay sees himself as a "fifth business" — a term Davies borrows from theatrical tradition. In classical drama, the five business characters are the clown, the servant, the elder, the young hero, and the fifth business, which is the fool-saint, the figure who suffers and transforms. Ramsay is convinced he occupies that role in his own life. Here's a detail people routinely overlook: Davies based aspects of this novel on real events from his own childhood in Stanleyville, Ontario (which became the fictional Deptford). The girl who drowns parallels a real childhood incident in Davies's life. But Davies doesn't use autobiography as a shortcut to meaning. He complicates it. The real event is distorted, doubled, reflected through multiple lenses within the fiction. This is one reason the book frustrates readers who want a simple "this is based on true events" takeaway. The truth of the novel isn't in the biographical source — it's in how Davies reinvents it. Another practical issue I run into: people try to map every character to a historical or literary figure and treat it as a puzzle to solve. That's a partial approach. Yes, Marie Cutten connects to Saint Sebastian. Yes, Ramsay's friend Boyd Dixon connects to various cultural archetypes. But Davies isn't running a one-to-one allegory. The connections are suggestive, not systematic. Treating the book as a decoding exercise produces a shallow reading. The mythological references work because they create resonance, not because they provide answers.

What Doesn't Work About This Book

The prose is ornate and sometimes overwrought. Davies indulges in long passages of exposition that don't always earn their place. There are sections, particularly around Ramsay's academic interests and folklore research, where the book slows to a crawl. If you're reading this for plot, you'll drop it. The plot is thin. What sustains the book is Ramsay's voice and the intellectual energy he brings to his own self-analysis. The ending is divisive. Some readers find it satisfying; others find it opaque and possibly unsatisfying. Ramsay reaches a kind of resolution, but it's ambiguous by design. Davies doesn't tie things up neatly, and that's a feature, not a bug. But if you want closure, you won't find it here. The book ends with Ramsay still uncertain about the full meaning of his life, which is arguably the most honest ending possible. If you're looking for a more accessible Canadian novel with similar themes, consider Mavis Gallant's short fiction or even Margaret Laurence's Manawaka series. Davies is uniquely erudite and stubbornly deliberate. He's not writing for casual reading.

How to Read It Properly

Read slowly. Don't rush through the digressions — they're where Davies does his real work. Keep a notebook or use digital margins to track the mythological and historical references. When Ramsay mentions a saint or a folk tradition, look it up. The payoff comes when those references start echoing back later in the text. Pay attention to the letter-writing and correspondence that frames much of the novel. Davies uses documents, letters, and archival material as narrative devices. These aren't decorative — they're how Ramsay constructs evidence for his own life story. The form mirrors the content: Ramsay is building a case, and the book invites you to serve as both jury and skeptic. The book is widely available in paperback from Penguin or Vintage, and the ebook versions are straightforward. No special editions are required for a first reading, though a version with footnotes will help with the dense references. The Deptford Trilogy as a whole benefits from being read in order — Business, The Sunflower, and Leaves of the Tree — because Davies returns to Deptford and its characters across all three volumes, deepening the meanings as you go.