Davies, Robertson 1913–

Davies is really a highly-considered Canadian novelist. (See also Contemporary Authors. Vols. 33-36.)

It’s a secure type of pleasure to start a manuscript by Canadian Author Robertson Davies. This isn’t since the readers knows what’s going to happen—Davies doesn’t write formula fiction—but while he is serenely certain of what’s going to not occur. The writer won’t search snarks, nor plant a forest of symbols after which explore it. Nor is he going to neglect to possess some rather compelling need to write instead of remain silent….

[Davies’] fiction resembles the job of these authors as Louis Auchincloss, James Gould Cozzens and C. P. Snow, in that—whatever the theme—in the telling, reason’s rule is absolute. This is often a chilly virtue in addition to a restricting one, however the limits are generous in Davies’ situation. His perceptions are wry and hard.

John Skow, “Solitary Voyage,” in Time (reprinted by permission from Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine 1971 by Time Corporation.), The month of january 11, 1971, p. 72.

[The Manticore ], as being a segment of a type of saga [where the first novel was The 5th Business. 1970], isn’t quite an organization, but refers backward to earlier work and hints broadly at what’s going to most likely come next…. Questions regarding occasions are elevated but left hanging, that is Mr. Davies’s way. He’s clearly creating a shelf of interlocking books the way in which Faulkner did using the Compsons and Snopses and Salinger did using the Glass family and that he is telling us: Love me, love my shelf.

So we pretty much do. He’s a very literate, intelligent man having a mystical and melodramatic imagination, and that he conveys a feeling of real existence resided inside a fully imagined if sometimes mythical and magical world.

Realists will most likely be placed off, however they never even loved Jung.

William Kennedy, in The Brand New You are able to Occasions The Review ( 1972 through the New You are able to Occasions Company reprinted by permission), November 19, 1972, pp. 4, 26.

The Novel Home is empty. Its tenants have came out witlessly into Barthian byways, through Borgesian mazes, to squat, disconsolate, at Beckett’s crossroads, awaiting some faceless God. Send for that wreckers. Tear that old mansion lower.

But, wait. Someone remains. A stately, bearded figure tramps with the rooms, righting dusty furniture, securing casement home windows. He’s Robertson Davies, a Canadian, an old actor, master of Massey College in the College of Toronto, author of six plays, seven books of critique and five novels [the newest being The Manticore. 1972]. He’ll save that old house. He’s in keeping with that old way….

For Davies, just like a living, breathing Victorian, chooses to exhibit us his world, British Canadian Ontario, anno domini 1970, with the melodramatic conventions, Dickensian coincidences and also the conscious pursuing “instruction” and “significance” which we affiliate with Disraeli or Mrs. Humphry Ward. It’s a closed world, a dichotomous one, dazzled by British titles, ape for provincial honors but, ultimately, one where wealth alone is for certain good….

Therefore the old Novel House stands. It features a custodian. Possibly Robertson Davies may bring the shoppers flowing into the lending libraries and finally fill the home together with his emulators.

Otherwise, a minimum of he’s dared to return inside, completely to the room towards the top of the steps. His can be now, because he once described it, a voice in the Canadian attic room.

John Moore, “There’s Existence within the Old Novel House,” in Book World—The Washington Publish ( The Washington Publish), November 26, 1972, p. 8.