In a preface, Robertson Davies describes “Fifth Business”
as the theatrical and operatic roles that aren’t the heroine, the
confidante, or the villain but are nonetheless essential to the plot.
In this first novel in Davies’s Deptford trilogy, Dunstable Ramsay is
Fifth Business, the odd man out. He doesn’t throw the snowball that
sets in motion the plot, but he was the intended target and ducked.
The snowball hits the pregnant Mary Dempster in the head. She has a son
prematurely and lapses into erratic behavior in which Ramsay sees
saintliness. Ramsay’s guilty connection to Mrs. Dempster will thread
together his life. He surreptitiously visits her when she is an
outcast. He teaches her son, Paul, magic tricks as a child, and Paul
will grow up to be a famous magician. Mary’s is the inspiring face
Ramsay thinks he sees on a religious statue when he is critically
injured in World War I. Recovered and wearing a wooden leg, he returns
to Canada and continues to keep track of Mrs. Dempster as he teaches at
a boys’ school and pursues his interests in mythology and hagiography.
He never marries.
The boy who threw the snowball, Percy Boyd Staunton, will become one of
Canada’s richest men. He will get his punishment at the end of the book
after Ramsay brings him together with Paul Dempster, who learns then of
how Staunton damaged his mother’s life. The long-ago incident is
resolved, with Ramsay realizing his destiny was to be Fifth Business.
The first-person novel is written as a letter to his school’s
headmaster after Ramsay’s 45 years of teaching. He was piqued by how he
was portrayed in the school newspaper’s account of his retirement
ceremony. The letter to the headmaster upholds “the vital though never
glorious role of Fifth Business.”
Home
My
reviews
My
friends' reviews