Davies proves he’s a master in `Murther & Walking Spirits’

MURTHER & WALKING SPIRITS, by Robertson Davies, Viking, 357 pages, $21.95.

“I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.” There may be other opening lines more arresting, but the only one that seems to come even close is that of Dodie Smith’s 1940s novel, “I Capture the Castle”: “I wrote this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

Pretty good, but not up to the standards of Robertson Davies. Nor is much of anything else in contemporary literature. Davies is a master storyteller in the grand tradition, as witness the long list of his outstanding novels stretching back to the early 1950s; where so many novels including best-sellers are so quickly forgotten, these are periodically reprinted.

Because Davies is most wonderfully readable, and despite the proven success of his earlier works in traditional form, he does not hesitate to try something new. Or perhaps something very old — the voice of the omniscient author — in a new form. In “What’s Bred in the Bone” (1985), Davies offers occasional ironic comment through the hero’s Guardian Angel conversing with the Angel of Biography. In “The Lyre of Orpheus” (1988), the spirit of E.T.A. Hoffmann (whose rough-sketched opera is finally being completed) discusses the action from time to time.

Contrivances? Devices? Old melodramatic tricks? Yes indeed, and effective and refreshing in these days of so much grim, depressing, anti-hero, sex-and-violence reality. “Escape from reality,” says the disembodied hero of “Murther & Walking Spirits,” “And what’s wrong with that? Haven’t I had plenty of reality? Or what people call reality, which always seems to mean something nasty?”

In “Murther & Walking Spirits,” then, the spirit of the murdered hero tells the story. Except that he is not really the hero, and he watches films — yes, films, not literary flashbacks — not of his personal life and untimely taking-off, but of what he became through the lives of his forebears. These are the real heroes, beginning with his mother’s loyalist ancestors in revolutionary New York, and on his father’s side, a wandering disciple of John Wesley in Wales.

How and where the principal characters of succeeding generations lived and eventually came together in Canada is told with wit, style, compassion, and a fine sense of editing for maximum effect. The advantage of the film-watching device is readily apparent here; no conventional, long-drawn-out family histories. The scenes cut, fade, dissolve into montages, focus and blur and refocus to eliminate any dead spots and maintain the flow of dramatic action. In adopting this technique, Davies has drawn on his long experience in the theater: He has himself acted with the Old Vic, was literary adviser to Sir Tyrone Guthrie, and is the author of eight plays “widely produced in Canada” to quote the stock flyleaf biography. One step further results in this remarkable blend of the traditional and the modern; the novel, the theater and the film.

So what sort of a book is “Murther & Walking Spirits”? The Spirit-narrator offers as good an estimate as any: “This is no tragedy of star-crossed lovers, nor are the elders of a stature to achieve tragic proportion. Theorists of the drama may deal in tragedy and comedy, but the realities of life are played more often in the mode of melodrama, farce, and grotesquerie.” And again: ” … One’s family is made up of supporting players in one’s personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.” But they do, in an excellent novel of unusual form.

Davies has taken his own advice in “A Voice From the Attic” (1960): “Critics like (to) experiment because they (are) weary of attempts to create masterpieces on conventional lines; they feel, understandably, that a new form or an unconventional approach might yield interesting, if not revolutionary, results.” So, too, for readers. “Murther & Walking Spirits” is yet another proof, if any be needed, of Anthony Burgess’ assessment: “Robertson Davies is without doubt Nobel Prize material.”

Henry Sherrerd is a free-lance writer who resides in Dexter.