The Truth

Description

206 pages
$18.99
ISBN 1-895837-66-9
DDC C813'.54

Author

Publisher

Year

1999

Contributor

Reviewed by Matt Hartman

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Review

Davies is Canada’s Renaissance man, having sampled vocational pursuits
as varied as motorcycle racing, antiquarian book dealing, pure
mathematics, the recording business, and technical writing. His ninth
book is an autobiographical amalgam of many of these pursuits. “My
life has proceeded in successive discrete compartments,” says
Davies’s fictional persona, Paul, early on. “Or it did after junior
high. That was the first. Next, high school. Then music school. And on
from there. The book business. The record business. School again. Then
lead and zinc mining. Then commercial art.”

In 1978, Paul begins a friendship with a British plumber named Cyril
Hoskin, who in 1949 “fell out of a tree and awoke claiming to be a
Tibetan monk. Or rather, that a Tibetan monk had inhabited his body.
That is, the person he’d originally been … was gone, and the monk
was now the whole person.” This, indeed, is a life lived in a
“discrete compartment,” and Paul feels a growing affinity with the
mystic, who has taken the name Lobsang.

In a series of 108 short chapters, the narrator moves on a picaresque
journey toward what he hopes will be self-discovery. “I’ve written
all this down for you,” he says in the 107th chapter (or
“thought”), “hoping that by doing so I might unlock my dilemma.
That by going back and recovering the beginning, the end might
unfold.” For its quirky style and sly humor, The Truth is well worth
reading.

Citation

Davies, Paul., “The Truth,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed February 7, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/8307.