Fifth Business - by Robertson Davies

As mentioned before, this is the title of one of the novels I'm reading for my ENGL 108M course this term. The literal and figurative meaning of the life moral "Never judge a book by its cover" has been hammered into my head, God knows how many times, and yet I instinctively judge books by the exterior packaging even today. When I first purchased this book from the book store, I was reluctant to start it, but I knew I had to get it over with sometime or later...and now? Well, things have surprisingly turned out for the better!

For those who have known me well before university and maybe even high school, I haven't always been the cynical/critical person I am today. I don't really know what happened along the way. I don't really know if this is a positive or negative change. I have just accepted that it's happened. I suppose it's been a combination of the people I've known, my life experiences, and my natural disposition to judge and analyze from the sidelines before taking the initiative to devise a plan of ACTION to induce desired CHANGE. Basically, a combination of the good old nature/nurture principle.

The Christie's Notes version of the book:
Dunstan Ramsay is unable to escape the guilt of a critical incident in his childhood, thereby affecting his outlook on his peers, ambitions, family, love, and life.

Anyways, the reason why this book really touched me was that I was able to identify really strongly with the main character who narrated the entire book from his perspective. In an attempt to illustrate my point, I've pulled a few passages from the book:

Liesl Vitzliputzli to Dunstan, "I beg your pardon. That is your privilege, you pseudo-cynical old pussy-cat, watching life from the sidelines and knowing where all the players go wrong. Life is a spectator sport to you. Now you have taken a tumble and found yourself in the middle of the fight, and you are whimpering because it is rough."

Again Liesl to Dunstan, "Why don't you shake hands with your devil, Ramsay, and change this foolish life of yours? Why don't you, just for once, do something inexplicable, irrational, at the devil's bidding, and just for the hell of it? You would be a different man...

Listen Ramsay, for the past three weeks you have been telling me the story of your life, with great emotional detail, and certainly it sounds as if you did not think you were human. You make yourself responsible for other people's troubles. It is your hobby...And you are secret and stiff-rumped about it all, and never admit it is damned good of you. That is not very human. You are a decent chap to everybody, except one special somebody, and that is Dunstan Ramsay. How can you be really good to anybody if you are not good to yourself?...

Even Calvinism can be endured, if you will make some compromise with yourself. But you--there is a whole great piece of your life that is unlived, denied, set aside. That is why at fifty you can't bear it any longer and fly all to pieces and pour out your heart to the first really intelligent woman you have met--met, that's to say--and get into a schoolboy yearning for a girl who is as far from you as if she lived on the moon. This is the revenge of the unlived life, Ramsay. Suddenly, it makes a fool of you."

Padre Blazon to Ramsay, "God is subtle, but he is not cruel...Try to understand the subtlety, and stop whimpering about the cruelty. Maybe God wants you for something special. Maybe so much that you are worth a woman's sanity.

Forgive yourself for being a human creature, Ramezay. That is the beginning of wisdom; that is part of what is meant by the fear of God; and for you it is the only way to save your sanity. Begin now or you will end up with your saint in the madhouse."

Dunstan himself, "...they all seemed to accept me as a genuine hero, and I did my best to behave decently, neither believing in it too obviously, not yet protesting that I was just a simple chap who had done his duty when he saw it--a pose that has always disgusted me. Ever since, I have tried to think charitably of people in prominent positions of one kind or another; we cast them in roles, and it is only right consider them as players, without trying to discredit them with knowledge of their off-stage life--unless they drag it into the middle of the stage themselves."

Since the course is Youth and Adolescence, the novel obviously relates to at least one of the two concepts. Our teacher also revealed the relation well before we delved into its pages: how incidences in childhood can affect one's growth and outlook all throughout the rest of one's life. Something I particularly enjoyed about the book was Dunstan's character. He seemed to be a really critical, grumpy, and realistic character. I like that in a narrator--none of that romantic, hopeful gibberish that female narrators are too often characterized by.

So why is this novel titled Fifth Business? It has nothing to do with business really. Again, I can't put it anymore eloquently than Davies has brilliantly done already,

"Who are you? Where do you fit into poetry and myth? Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business. You don't know what that is?

Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna--always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.

So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody's death if that is part of the plot.

The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices.

Are you Fifth Business? You had better find out."

LOVE THIS BOOK.