Fifth Business (1970) is the first novel of the Deptford Trilogy, a series of books written by the noted Canadian novelist Robertson Davies which tread a line between normalcy and magic realism, which trace the chaotic consequences of a single act of cruelty on the lives of three young men from the small Canadian village of Deptford.
The novel takes the form of a letter from retired schoolteacher Dunstan Ramsay to his unnamed headmaster; annoyed at being portrayed during his own retirement party as a doddering old geezer who'd never had any sort of life outside of the classroom, Dunstan begins to relate his life's story to illustrate that the younger colleagues who dismiss him don't know the first thing about what he's really like. So he begins with the winter day in his childhood when he and his sometime-friend Percy Boyd Staunton were quarreling more fiercely than usual: Percy throws a snowball with a rock in it, Dunstan ducks, and the snowball strikes a passing woman, Mary Dempster, the heavily pregnant young wife of the local parson. The resulting injury brings her to premature labour, causes her severe mental trauma, and forever alters the lives of three boys associated with the event: Dunstan, Percy, and Mary's premature son Paul Dempster.
Despite its rather dense prose and frequent highbrow allusions, Fifth Business ultimately explores a fairly simple idea. Simply put: not everyone is the hero of their own story. While destiny might single some people out for momentous deeds and accomplishments, the world is also full of people who are fated to play unacknowledged supporting roles in the lives of the great and powerful, and those people's lives are just as worthwhile and fulfilling as anyone else's. If all the world's a stage, some people will always have to play the part of "fifth business"—that is, parts that don't fit cozily into the four basic roles of "Hero", "Villain", "Lover", and "Confidant", but are nonetheless crucial to resolving the plot.
Over the course of his long life, Ramsay gradually comes to realize that he's one such person; although he has no great destiny of his own, he spends his life on the sidelines of other people's great world-altering trials. By turns, he becomes a supporting player in the lives of a revered corporate CEO, a godly saint, and a world-class Stage Magician. Each of those three figures walks a different path, but they're all the embodiment of a different form of power: worldly wealth, the grandeur of the divine, and the subtle and mysterious art of mysticism.
The novel derives a lot of its popularity from its resonance with national anxieties in Davies' native Canada. While its narrative is open to interpretation, it's often viewed as an allegory for the Canadian people's struggle with their reputation as the "supporting players" of modern history.
Tropes featured in this novel:
- Abusive Parents - By modern standards, Dunny's mother is this, and although Paul's father the Reverend Amasa Dempster has decent intentions, he comes off as a combination of this and a passive-aggressive Church Militant. Boy Staunton is also this to David.
- All of the Other Reindeer - The Deptford villagers to Paul Dempster, after the incident at the gravel pit with his mother. Dunstan is pretty much the only person in the whole village who still tries to be kind to him after that. Years down the road, we find out Paul/Magnus hasn't forgotten that petty cruelty, although he *has* risen above it.
- Arc Words - "Who killed Boy Staunton?"
- Beauty Equals Goodness: Subverted every which way with Liesl. While she's far from being good (Dunstan even compares her to the Devil at one point), she's certainly brilliant, fascinating, and apparently quite the lover despite her simian appearance, and Dunstan winds up having an enduring, fulfilling, and intellectually complex relationship with her, a sharp contrast to the pretty but shallow "one that got away", Leola.
- Broken Ace: Boy, as it turns out.
- Deadpan Snarker - Dunstan Ramsay. It's actually his trademark and first line of defense as a child.
- Driven to Suicide - it's implied this may have happened to Leola, by leaving the windows open while sick. Later, it happens to Boy Staunton in a very literal sense.
- The Ditz - Leola Staunton. Much more tragic than most instances of this trope.
- Foil - Boy to Dunstan, over the course of their entire lives. Strangely, a lot of the time they don't actually dislike each other, and usually get along despite being diametrically opposed in personality.
- Girl on Girl Is Hot: Averted in Dunstan's reaction to finding out about Liesl and Faustina.
- Honor Thy Parent: When Dunstan (then "Dunstable") was thirteen, he took an egg from the kitchen to practice a magic trick. His mother, a Thrifty Scot who actually bothers to count her eggs, demands to know if he thinks she is made of eggs. Being thirteen and all, Dunstable can't resist talking back and answers that this is something she will have to decide for herself. This is something his mother cannot abide. She produces a toy pony whip which she had once confiscated from his brother and which she uses for administering Corporal Punishment. He laughs and she strikes him on the shoulder. He then shouts: "Don't you dare touch me," which makes the mother utterly livid. She chases Dunstable around the kitchen, whipping him until they are both crying, and once she has broken him, she continues beating him and berating him, until she has had her fill of what would seem to be vengeance, finally shutting herself in her bedroom. When Dunstable's father and brother come home, they side with the mother and Dunstable is compelled to humbly apologize to her on his knees.
- I Kiss Your Hand - Dunny to Faustina.
- I Have Many Names - Being one of the "twice-born" is an important thread through the book, especially towards the end, and especially regarding Paul Dempster /Magnus Eisengrim
- Jerkass - Boy, although he's much more sympathetic than most. He screws up his family something fierce, has a very high opinion of himself to the end, and utterly refuses to take any sort of responsibility for ruining the lives of the Dempsters.
- Given Ramsay's often uncharitable narration, almost every major character in the book has their share of Jerkass moments, and he's brutally honest about his own shortcomings and petty motivations.
- Karma Houdini - Subverted with Boy. It looks like his cruel behaviour during childhood and his adult years have rewarded him with wealth, fame, and position in Canadian society. But for various reasons entirely appropriate to his character, he's fundamentally unhappy in spite of it all. Then he has a fateful encounter with Magnus Eisengrim, the literal inheritor of the legacy of Houdini...
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Is Mary Dempster really a Saint? Are Magnus Eisengrim's magic tricks more than simple illusions? And—most importantly—did magic play some role in Boy Staunton's death?
- Meaningful Rename – Boyd Staunton becomes Boy, an icon of youthful success, while Dunstable Ramsay starts calling himself Dunstan, after Saint Dunstan, and Paul Dempster ditches his old identity entirely to become Magnus Eisengrim.
- My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad - Staunton to Ramsay, when they were both 10, at the start of the book.
- My Greatest Failure - Dunstan feels responsible for Mrs. Dempster's mental illness and Paul's premature birth.
- No Communities Were Harmed - Deptford is a fictional Ontario town, but would be based to a greater or lesser extent on Thamesville, ON, the author's birthplace. Colborne College, the private Toronto school at which Dunstan Ramsay teaches and which David Staunton attends, is a thinly-veiled Upper Canada College, a prestigious local boys' school. Likewise, Bishop Cairncross's, the sister school attended by David's sister and his girlfriend Judy, is a stand-in for Toronto's Bishop Strachan School.
- Parental Blamelessness: In Fifth Business, when Dunstan is in hospital recovering from wounds sustained in World War I, he receives notice that his authoritarian and somewhat narcissistic mother and his pushover father who had been her enabler have died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. His initial reaction is to be "...ashamed because I felt the loss so little." He goes on to describe how "It was years before I thought of the death of my parents as anything other than a relief; in my thirties I was able to see them as real people, who had done the best they could in the lives fate had given them." This comment is left as a bald statement for which Dunstan does not provide any justification for why his parents couldn't have done better than they did. In The Manticore, David Staunton decides to undergo psychoanalysis following the untimely death of his arrogant millionaire father, who had resented David's going into law instead of business and his never marrying, ultimately disinheriting him in favor of his second wife and her daughter. Before beginning the psychotherapy in earnest, David claims to the psychoanalyst that he does not hold a grudge against his father, criticizes the recent trend toward putting blame on parents, and states that, as a lawyer, he believes there has to be a statute of limitationsnote for every crime. His argument doesn't take into account the fact that he wasn't really given a chance to have the wrongs wrought by his father righted while the latter still was alive. Later in the book, though, the author provides an aversion to the trope as well, specifically in the backstory of Liselotte Naegeli, who blamed her grandfather, whose ward she was, for her deformed appearance. Specifically, as an early adolescent, Liselotte had started growing uncontrollably; she was subjected to medical treatment presumably consented to by her grandfather and about which she was not consulted, which arrested her growth but left her with ungainly, unfeminine features. Out of bitterness, she took her revenge on him by smashing her grandfather's prized collection of mechanical toys, and for a period of time acted like a vicious, unkempt, antisocial domestic pest.
- Parental Marriage Veto: Happens to David as a teenager with regards to his first girlfriend, Judy Wolff. She comes from a Jewish family and oddly, her parents encourage the relationship in its early stages. But once they have been together for some time, Judy's father has a man-to-man talk with David, in which he tells him straight out that Judy is not meant for a gentile, that she is to be sent to Europe to further her education, and that while he may keep coming around on social calls, he had better not try anything more serious than that. This leaves David indignant, and he speaks to Judy about it. She, however, trusts her parents' wisdom in the matter. He also goes to his spiritual teacher, an Anglican priest, for sympathy, and the latter also claims that Judy's parents have made the right decision. This unfortunate episode at a pivotal time in David's life results in his becoming cynical about the Church and contributes to him becoming aloof toward women.
- Parents as People: The trilogy is positively thematic in its treatment of characters whose parents or substitute parental figures demonstrate failings to various degrees. There is hardly any parent or guardian to be found within the pages of the three novels who can really be called competent in this role or who can easily be said to have fully done right by their offspring.
- Professional Sex Ed: In The Manticore, David tells his psychoanalyst that some time after he had started dating Judy as a teenager, his father Boy Staunton, who was looking forward to futher continuation of the family, was delighted to learn that David had gotten himself his first girlfriend. Boy has David join him on a trip to Montreal, where he introduces him to a lady friend of his. Not long after, David finds himself in quarters adjacent to her at the hotel; she entices him toward her and brings about sexual intercourse between them. However, this initiation backfires; shortly afterward, the woman comes up in conversation between David and Boy; the latter ventures to make a thinly-veiled remark to the effect that she can teach David a lot of things that he can do to Judy - David sees right through this and realizes that his father has set him up. It plays a not insignificant part in his becoming a sex-averse bachelor and thus, fast forward to the time of Boy's death, his son has not given him the grandchildren he desired.
- P.O.V. Sequel - The Manticore mostly covers the same chronological period as Fifth Business, but told from the perspective of David Staunton; key scenes from the first novel take on a completely different perspective in his eyes.
- Punny Name - the pseudonyms that Dunny gave to his past lovers: Anges Day, Gloria Mundy, and Libby Doe (puns on the Latin phrases: Agnus Dei, Gloria Mundi, and Libido).
- Rape as Backstory: The protagonist of World of Wonders, world famous illusionist Magnus Eisengrim (born Paul Dempster), tells how as a boy he was lured to a circus by its magician "Le Solitaire", who kidnapped and molested him. Paul toured with the circus as "Le Solitaire's" captive apprentice and effective sex slave, eventually asserting himself as he got older. Finally, in his evil mentor's old age, Paul/Magnus became the former's caregiver, and got some measure of revenge by not treating him as well as he could have.
- Sexily Modest: In The Manticore, the protagonist, David Staunton, tells his psychoanalyst about the time he spent in the 1940s with Judy Wolff, his First Love. He describes her schoolgirl uniform in a way that actually succeeds in playing the trope despite the fact that it was revealing: the short skirt it came with was meant to suggest that the students were childishly innocent (at the time, a properly dressed grown woman would generally not have shown her knees), but as they were already teenage girls, it came across as sexy: "She laughed at herself about being fat, but of course she wasn't. Curvy. Those uniforms that schools like Bishop Cairncross's insisted on at that time were extraordinarily revealing. If a girl had breasts, they showed up under those middies, and some girls had positive shelves almost under their chins. And those absurd short blue skirts, showing seemingly miles of leg from ankle to thigh. It was supposed to be a modest outfit, to make them look like children, but a pretty girl dressed like that is a quaint, touching miracle. The sloppy ones and the fatties were pretty spooky, but not a girl like Judy."
- Stage Magician - Dunstan tries to do this and fails hard. His pupil Paul Dempster is rather better at it, although he pays a price for becoming Magnus Eisengrim, the greatest magician in the world.
- Unlucky Childhood Friend: Dunstan, but since he stays involved in Boy and Leola's lives enough to watch her ungraceful aging and the collapse of their marriage, he doesn't regret it nearly as much as some do.
- Unreliable Narrator: Within the trilogy, the same past events are sometimes described by different characters, allowing us to see their respective points of view, along with differences in the way they remember, or claim to remember them.
- Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Subverted. Dunstan has a knock-down drag-out fist fight with Liesl after she comes on to him in the aftermath of the Faustina incident. They...make up later.
