The Manticore

by Robertson Davies, 254 Pages. Penguin Books. 

It's probably blasphemy to be Canadian and attack anything written by Robertson Davies, but I'm going to do it anyway. (I've done it before; back in university, I argued that Tempest-Tost was a great failure of literature). The Manitcore is not a lousy book but it is massively underwhelming, especially given that it won the Governor's General Award back in 1972. Rumor has it this was an apologetic award, as in the Governor General was apologizing for not giving Davies the award for the far superior Fifth Business in 1970.  One can only hope the rumor is true; either that or 1972 was a (really) bad year for Canadian fiction.


The second book in Mr. Davies much-lauded Deptford trilogy (Fifth Business was the first), The Manitcore's primary weakness is its structure which is self-serving and diminishes any dramatic weight the narrative might otherwise have. David Staunton has traveled to Zurich to commence Jungian therapy following his father's suicide, thus commencing almost two hundred pages (at least in this edition) of patient / analyst psychobabble whose sole purpose is exposition. The analyst is a completely functionary character, the "wise doctor" who helps Staunton dive into his own soul. She has no personality of her own and as we never see her outside of the sessions, she never has a chance to become remotely human.

This seems to be a brutal mistake by Mr. Davies. Any story that presents a patient / analyst premise is essentially making the patient / analyst relationship the central focus of the narrative (consider Peter Shaffer's Equus, John Pleimeier's Agnes of God or even the film Analyse This). If the analyst is not going to be a character, then they have no business standing at centre stage. Sadly, there's nobody else to share the spotlight with David Staunton and this is essentially The Manticore's great weakness: it lacks a central relationship to drive the narrative. David Staunton talks a lot about the past, but he doesn't really want anything in the present. There is no urgency to his situation and so there is no tension driving the book forward.


If I'm using a lot of theatrical metaphors, it's because this book is begging to be a play: most of the book consists of dialogue (some of it is even written in play format). Although perhaps it's better that it didn't ever make it to the stage because, in the worst traditions of the theatre, Mr. Davies' cast of characters are all far too self-aware. They are loudspeakers for the author's own thoughts and rarely espouse any of their own. None of them seem to truly need anything for each other: they simply speak for no other reason than Mr. Davies has said they should speak.

All of this is unfortunate because when David finally shuts up - that is, when he simply tells his life story - the book is far more interesting. The life of privilige he was born into starts showing signs of unraveling right from an early age and much of his narrative consists of the way this unraveling becomes a permanent thing. Davies has a great deal of fun attacking the hypocrisies of characters pretending they deserve to live in "Toronto the Good" and David Staunton himself has the potential to be a fascinating character. But Mr. Davies' structure continues to undermine his own intentions, making for a book that is readable without ever being truly engaging.