Rating: 
Summary: A Masterpiece...No, Wait! Make That Three
Review: I read "The Manticore" at the suggestion of a friend when I told him I was taking a course in Jungian therapy. HAH! Prof Davies taught me far more than my instructor (in fact, the instructor smiled ruefully when I showed him the book..."I can't compete" was his only comment). I moved backwards to Fifth Business, then to World of Wonders. The fascination never abated, the tempo never wavered, and Davies' fine touch was assured and light. It's obvious Robertson Davies was an accomplished playwrite, his written conversations are such that I want to cry out to the characters: Wait! I have something to say about that!Needless to say, I went on to read everything Davies ever wrote, including his Samuel Marchbanks collections. He remains one of my all-time favorite authors, and this collection is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of his strength.
Rating:
Summary: The finest trilogy ever written?
Review: I think so. The three novels that make up the book manage to interlock so closely that they cannot honestly be separated. Yet they can easily be read apart. Here Davies takes ideas of his favourite psychologist and combines them with his ideas of morality, guilt, sainthood, magic, and the whole world of the Shadow. If ever there was a book for the modern age it is this trilogy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent inspiring trilogy
Review: I was (as most Robertson Davies fans are) introduced to his work by an extremely enthusiastic friend. Robertson Davies is a genius. The novels of this trilogy span the development of the most fascinating characters that I've ever seen in print. He weaves an honest and at times strangely familiar tale through the magic and myth that underlies our society. The characters are unforgettable, the read humorous and insightful- rates as one of my favourite books I've read thusfar.
Rating:
Summary: Unique, challenging, and endlessly entertaining
Review: I've enjoyed all Davies' work that I have read so far, but I don't think there's any doubt that The Deptford Trilogy represents his greatest achievement. Count me among those who liked "The Manticore" the most of the three -- it is, by far, the most intellectually challenging, and the novel that most ties Davies' writing to the work of Carl Jung. The mythic elements described in "The Manticore" are key to understanding everything that unfolds in the other two novels. The characters are vivid, believable, and yet entirely original; Davies' style is enviably witty and eloquent. Why this writer, and these books, aren't better known is beyond me; I believe that eventually they'll be recognized as some of the best work of the century.
Rating:
Summary: Whimsical mythology made modern
Review: If there is a boundary beyond which realistic fiction crosses into the fantastical, it seems to have been explored and even blurred by Robertson Davies in this trio of novels which represent the broadest imaginative range of realistic fiction. The closest contemporary comparison I can make is John Barth, but Davies, possibly by way of being Canadian, establishes his originality by balancing North American folk charm with a British style of sophistication. The subject is the turbulent and often hilarious lives of three men whose hometown is the rural village of Deptford, Ontario. They are Dunstan Ramsay, a history teacher, hagiographer (somebody who studies saints and sainthood), and decorated World War I veteran; the arrogant but vulnerable Percy Boyd "Boy" Staunton, a wealthy confectionery businessman, politician, and Dunstan's lifelong friend; and the pitiable Paul Dempster, whose premature birth was precipitated by his mother's injury from being hit accidentally by a snowball thrown by Staunton at Ramsay on a fateful winter day in 1908. The event that provides the basis for the trilogy is Staunton's death sixty years later, when his Cadillac mysteriously plunges off a pier into a harbor. The three novels form a complex story that is structured almost like a murder mystery but has much more psychological depth and detailed characterization and is more studious of the nature of consequences. The first two novels, "Fifth Business" and "The Manticore," discuss the life of Boy Staunton through the respective viewpoints of Ramsay, who tells all in an extensive, sarcastically toned report to the headmaster of the academy from which he is retiring, and Staunton's son David, now a successful criminal lawyer, who recalls his relationship with his father during a series of sessions with a Zurich psychiatrist. But it is the third novel, "World of Wonders," in which the continuation of the story really takes flight. This novel covers the fascinating life story of a brilliant magician and master illusionist named Magnus Eisengrim who, from humble and sordid beginnings as a carnival underling, has become famous throughout the world for his spectacular stage shows and now lives in a palatial Swiss chalet with his manager and consort, a strange woman named Liesl. That he has enlisted Ramsay as his biographer is not his only connection to Deptford or to the events surrounding Boy Staunton's watery death. Combining the themes of Ramsay's inquiries into the qualifications for sainthood, David Staunton's chimerical dreams, and Eisengrim's spellbinding but essentially mundane magic, "The Deptford Trilogy" maintains its narrative thrust by a thorough cross-pollination of ideas from reality and mythology. The insight revealed is that every human life, real or imagined, has qualities that are mythical because none of us can personally experience everything that happens to everybody else. This seems like an obvious precept of fiction, but it takes a marvel-minded writer like Davies to illustrate it with so much vivacity and wonder.
Rating:
Summary: Best to read all three at once
Review: If you're going to read any one of these books, you should do what I did and read all three of them at once. The Fifth Business is a clever biography of a man who lives in the shadow of the supposed main plot ("Who Killed Boy Staunton"). I think Davies at his best is when he is writing a biography like this one. The Manticore is very interesting, an abrupt departure into the world of Jungian analysis. Its narrator shows the previous narrator in a different light. World of Wonders lives up to its name, a richly textured tale with mystery and twists at every turn. In reading all three together, each narrative illuminates the other two. What I liked the most about these novels is that they are written in a very literary way, but full of humor and jest. The characters are sometimes likeable, sometimes challenging, but at the end you feel like you have progressed an intellectual and/or spiritual distance and really learned something. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to sit down and read something very well-written and fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: Patron Saint of the Clerisy of Readers
Review: Intelligent, humorous, erudite, thoughtful, perceptive, great wit ..... how else to describe the late, great Robertson Davies? A great humanist, literary critic, reader, professor, philosopher, patron of the dramatic arts. No subject - from metaphysical discussions on the origins of man's immortal soul to ribald tales of the absurd - was outside the realm of his piercing intellect and his ability to discern and describe. The pain of Davies' loss to the mortal world (thus the realization of a finite number attached to works which produce such joy) can only be salved by revisiting the old paths already walked. Fifth Business and the Deptford Trilogy were Davies' first and greatest work. The themes of religion and mysticism, education, philosophy, artistic endeavor leading to personal revelation and discovery, of Jungian inter-relationships of man, his environment and his society, of the complex inter-relationship of physical, spiritual and intellectual factors which define one's character, all start here and spread throughout Davies' body of fiction. Every Davies' fan is a fanatic - rabidly jealous of the uninitiated who can still look forward to the great joy of reading Davies' work for the first time. Read, enjoy and engage your mind for a session with the erudite one. Davies advocated the formation of a clerisy of readers - individuals committed to the study and enjoyment of any and all literature with the potential to enrich spirit, intellect and soul. No better place to enlist in the clerisy than with Davies' own work.
Rating:
Summary: Magical Realism That's Pure Magic
Review: It all starts many years ago in Deptford, a small village in Canada. Young Percy Boyd (Boy) Staunton throws a snowball containing a stone at his boyhood friend Dunstan Ramsay, which misses. It instead hits the head of the wife of a dour and fanatically religious minister, which causes her to give birth prematurely to a son, whom she names Paul. She eventually goes insane. As a very young boy, Paul Dempster learns from Dunstan Ramsay the rudiments of card tricks and other such conjurings. Believed to have run away with the circus, Paul was instead abducted and enslaved by Willard, a carnival magician. Paul hones his skills with cards to do extraordinary tricks with them at the carnival while hidden inside a hollow, mechanical dummy. Ramsay, while travelling in Europe many years later to do research on saints (who of whom he considers Paul's mother), discovers Paul Dempster performing in his own magic show. Paul now takes the name "Magnus Eisengrim." David Staunton, who is Boy Staunton's son, attends one of Eisengrim's shows, where he loudly asks the mystical "Brazenhead" that is on the stage, "Who killed Boy Staunton?," who had died after his car mysteriously plunged into a lake. Although this is mystery is logically resolved at the end, it is really no matter. This is basically the story of how one seemingly minor incident, in this case the errant snowball, can have the power to alter people's destinies. Were it not for this snowball, Paul Dempster would not have been prematurely born and would have in all probability become a Baptist minister, like his father, instead of the great, but mysterious Magnus Eisengrim, as well as the other identities he had previously taken on. In one such previous personna, he joins a repertoire company as an understudy to the great actor, Sir John Tresize. Robertson Davies' writing style is pure enchantment. This is particularly apparent in his description of Sorgenfrei castle in Switzerland where Paul is hired to repair the broken toys of an aristocratic industrialist. It is in Sorgenfrei where Magnus meets Liesl, the strange, grotesque, and ape-like granddaughter of the industrialist. Magnus works magic and transforms Liesl, who later becomes his show partner and his lover, into a woman of bearing and substance. Robertson Davies spends a great deal of time plumbing the depths of the personalities of each of the three book's major characters, and especially that of the soul of Paul Dempster/Magnus Eisengrim. The results are never less than fascinating. The entire second book, "The Manticore," concerns itself with the psychoanalysis of David Staunton, who must come to terms with his alcoholism and deep-seated problems related to his father. Eisengrim, which means "wolf," is said by one of the book's characters, to have studied Sir John's character to such an extent that he "ate" and became him. One common, and often cliched, criticism of long and episodic novels such as "The Deptford Trilogy," is that the whole, sadly, does not equal the sum of its many parts. These three books-- which must be read as a whole rather than as separate, independent novels--by examining the many sides, personalities, and roles of the extraordinarily complicated and amazing Paul Dempster/Magnus Eisengrim, richly and triumphently achieves a whole that much more than exceeds the sum of its parts.
Rating:
Summary: Worth reading and re-reading
Review: Like maudeo (previous review ... excellent!), I have read this trilogy multiple times, and each time find something new, exciting, and mysterious within. I never hesitate to recommend this work to any friend who evidences a taste for good reading. I came across this work (5th Business) 20 years ago as a radio play on CBC while driving to Ottawa. I was "transfixed" by the story and listened to its several parts over the next few weeks. I then hurried to buy the book and devoured it immediately, as well as the other two parts of the trilogy. While I have subsequently read other books by Davies, none has given me as much pleasure over the years as these.
Rating: 
Summary: A mixed bag
Review: Of the 3 novels here, Fifth Business is a fascinating, sort of rococo blend of characters (tycoons, magicians, hagiographers, hoboes, etc.). To me, it suffers from the claustrophobic mindset of the narrator, but no question it is well worth reading. World of Wonders is a luxuriant fantasy--the weird twists and turns of fate that produce the magician of Fifth Business--but again the eye you see it all through is dark and wordly-wise, fairly cynical, and you begin to suspect this is Davies' one and only voice. There's some to-do with an ogre-heiress which is tiresome. Still, both Fifth Business and World of Wonders have more than enough intricate storytelling to enthrall you, probably, for a while. The Manticore, however, is a terrible novel. It never should have been printed on its own (was it, in fact?). Who can take this dialogue with a Swiss psychoanalyst (an attractive woman, no less) seriously? It is a torture to plod through. 4 stars for the other two novels, 1 for Manticore.
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