The Cunning Man

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Like Dunstan Ramsay (and his creator), the narrator of this novel is an
observer, always slightly on the outside. Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a medical
practitioner in Toronto, has watched the city for most of his life,
savoring its passions and feuds. The city, Davies’s own turf, is in
some sense a character in the tale. Davies told one interviewer that The
Cunning Man is “about” Toronto, a city he considers “extremely
interesting.” He confessed further that Dr. Hullah’s outlook on
Toronto is autobiographical, and that “the doctor himself does think a
lot of things that I think.”

The novel begins with a death in front of the altar of an Anglican
church on Good Friday. Dr. Hullah is present, and the problem that
continues to plague him is, should he have taken the false teeth? If he
had, things would have been different. It will be some time before we
learn why. With typical ingenuity and panache, Davies plunges the reader
into a rich plum pudding of a tale, all the more arcane for its familiar
features. Toronto society and institutions are the outgrowth of the
colonial Upper Canada whose psyche Davies has probed for so long.

Here, as in all his novels over the past quarter-century, Davies
reveals an extraordinary range of learning and curiosity. Sometimes the
learning threatens to swamp the tale. Dr. Hullah is less sympathetic as
a narrator than Dunstan Ramsay, but the city—as both setting and
actor—is a wonderful creation. Davies continues to be what he says a
writer must be: “an entertainer ... essentially a storyteller with a
lot behind the story.”