Mud and Magic Shows: Robertson Davies's Fifth Business

David A. Kent teaches English at Centennial College and is the editor of
Christian Poetry in Canada.

ECW Press’s Canadian Fiction Studies series provides critical
backgrounds for students of Canadian literature. Each volume is written
by a specialist, is devoted to a major work of fiction, and includes in
its apparatus a chronology of key events and publications in the
author’s life, a statement about the significance of the work in
question, an overview of the work’s critical reception, a
bibliography, and an index. The central concern of each volume is,
however, an analysis of the novel.

In this volume, Patricia Monk, who has written elsewhere about
Robertson Davies, presents a careful analysis of a complex book. For
Monk, the central concept of Fifth Business is its author’s dualistic
worldview—the actual and the mythic—and belief in the
interdependence of these two worlds. While Monk acknowledges that the
novel is both morally engaged and concerned with Canada, most of her
attention is necessarily focused on how Davies’s characters function
both realistically and as part of an essentially allegorical (Jungian)
subtext. Her excellent introduction admirably elucidates this novel’s
complexities.