The Deptford Trilogy
by Robertson Davies

List Price: $22.00
Our Price: $12.49
You Save: $9.51 (43%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.04 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of The Deptford Trilogy

Book Review: "You Never Can Tell."
Summary: 5 Stars

The Deptford Trilogy braids the diverse lives of three main characters who achieve their respective fame in wholly different ways. One, as a schoolteacher/hagiologist; one as an entrepeneur/financier; and the other as a master magician/illusionist. Each book focuses in its order on the above mentioned characters respectively. But the theme of "you never can tell" is consistent throughout. It is brilliant how Davies disperses these characters and then brings them back together, and while these reunions sometimes totter on the very edge of the overly contrived (or improbable), they always seem to fall back on the near side of believability. He literally stuffs the envelope of circumstance without lapsing into the absurd. We are left with the sense that the events of these stories could have happened to anyone... yet these events are, in themselves, so magnificent! Does this mean that each of our own simple lives have similar potential for greatness?

I believe Davies would answer with a resounding "Definitely!" He once said, "You never can tell where something quite extraordinary and unexpected will come about. In a little Ontario village three men may be born so closely together that their lives run parallel courses, who may influence the world in quite different ways." He shows us in the Deptford Trilogy how (seemingly) insignificant beginnings can lead to tremendous endings. In fact, nothing that happens in life is insignificant.

I can't imagine anyone wading into Fifth Business and wanting out before they finished World Of Wonders.

December 2nd, 1995 saw the passing of Robertson Davies; the loss of a man of letters whom John Irving considered to be "the greatest comic novelist in the English language since Charles Dickens." Read the Deptford Trilogy, and you will wish, as I do, that there were an answer to the question... "What has Mr. Davies written lately?"

Literary Books

• Books > Subjects > Literature & Fiction