The Cunning Man

There are elements in the sharp glint and shady eyes in the portrait of Robertson Davies, the author of this insightful novel, first published in U.K. in 1995, portraying ‘The Cunning Man’ – “cunning in concealing what his true nature might be” – demonstrating the balance between the humour, both dry and fruity, and the deep psychological understanding of humanity that flows through his most readable prose.

The book tells the story of a medical man who takes a psychoanalytical approach to presenting physical ailments and is credited with more wisdom than he would claim. Perhaps we will never know “his true nature”, yet are aware of his benefit to mankind.

The various devices for narrating his path through life consist of material for the feature of a journalist who is his niece by marriage; his relationships with school friends and their differing families; his journey through medical training; his wartime doctoring; his discussions about comparative religions; his Case Book, and his notes for “The Anatomy of Fiction”.

Observation of different families and their child rearing methods aid his insights into the contribution of upbringing to character building, sometimes delivered with humour. “As for the invalidism of Mrs Gilmartin it was a complexity of ailments………not unconnected with habitual overeating.”; sometimes delivered with underlying opprobrium: “…they took no heed whatever of the baby who lingers in us all, so long as we live and whose demands must sometimes be met”, yet “A happy home doesn’t prepare you for the rough and tumble of life” or “the malaise of one family member can infect a whole household and rob it of its spirit”.

“She was not a raving beauty, but she had fine eyes and a Pre-Raphaelite air of being too good for this world while at the same time exhibiting much of what this world desires in a woman, and I suppose I gaped at her and behaved clownishly.” displays self-deprecating incisive dry wit. “The wit’s desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement”.

He introduces references to his knowledge of the theatre and a wide range of other writers, such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Proust, and Dostoevsky. “….the praise that is given to a great Hamlet or a great Othello, or the infinitely rarer great Lear, is always diminished by the feeling that the chap simply goes on the stage and says what Shakespeare has written for him and draws his sword when the director tells him to.” Are any of us, perhaps the writer wonders, our own men or women?

Throughout, the author displays sensitivity and empathy. It was as an army doctor that “I first understood that the physician is the priest of our modern, secular world.” Priests, however, struggle to find their place.

Perhaps aided by sentence lengths and by a journalistic rather than a poetic style, the prose carries us along at a steady rate with good control of conversation. This is not to say that Robertson is short on descriptive ability, as when picturing rooms, environment, or clothing to symbolise the nature of his well developed characters; not that he has no liking for alliteration, such as “weary, wincing, winsome”; “faintly fregiferous”; “essentially similar specimens of some subspecies of humanity”; or for metaphor and simile, such as “The modern pieces [of furniture]… are pleasant but not personal, like the staff in a good hotel”.

The broad ranging themes stated by the Observer reviewer beneath that back cover photograph are woven into the story of the author’s and his protagonists’ lifetime that culminates in a final surprise linking us back to the beginning.