Affable, familiar ghosts
Andrew Brown
MURTHER AND WALKING SPIRITS by Robertson Davies Sinclair-Stevenson, £14.95, pp. 357 There was an Old Man with a beard Who said, 'It is just as I feared! — Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard!'
From the back of his latest novel it is apparent that Robertson Davies has a very capacious beard indeed. He is full of wiry little idiosyncrasies and professorial tangles of mind. Murther and Walking Spirits is sim- ilarly irritating and full of surprises. Best things first: the writing is vivid and immedi- ate. Much of the action takes place at a Spectral film festival, and many of the scenes have the arbitrary and disturbing power of a film. There is no question that Mr Davies is an unusually talented writer, using his talents fully, and generally a Very Good Thing, whose books one ought to read, and even pay for. But what exactly is he using his talents for?
This is a very difficult book to categorise beyond calling it 'good'. Perhaps that ought to raise its category automatically to 'excel- lent'. In form, it is a series of historical novellas, told by a ghost. That sounds frighteningly bearded, but be of good heart. The great demerit of historical fiction — a forced quality, with the author's knowledge needlessly intruding — only appears in the section dealing with present- day Canada. Crassness vanishes as the book advances to the past.
The narrator (an arts journalist) is killed by a blow on the side of his head, delivered by another reviewer, whom he has sur- prised in bed with his wife (a columnist). What has really shocked him is the low character and quality of the critic with whom his wife has betrayed him. 'Oh, no, Esme, not The Sniffer!', was his fatal outcry.
'The Sniffer' has acquired his name from 'sniffing out' influences in the films he reviews. He also carries a bludgeon concealed in his walking-cane, which metaphor for a critic's affected aggression he uses to kill the narrator. Despite all this niggling silliness at the beginning, he takes life once he has killed. In his efforts to evade the burden of guilt by first conceal-
ing, and then confessing, his crime, he shows himself a man of poor spirit.
The narrator is the spirit of a generous man. He admires the firm domestic competence with which his wife conceals the facts of the crime, shucks off her murderous lover, and begins a book on coping with bereavement. But most of his business, when not concerned with his own past, lies in haunting his murderer on his round of 'thin white sandwiches and thin white wine' as a film critic.
At this point the book takes wing from cleverness to simplicity. That the cleverness is easily comprehensible and the simplicity quite baffling in its purpose suggests that real art is emerging.
As the murderer watches the films of the festival, the narrator, accompanying him, sees his own films as a sort of descant on the classics projected in front of him. These cover, he slowly realises, the lives of his ancestors. It is a mark of excellence that the reader is left in doubt for ages as to which member of any particular family is to be a direct ancestor of the narrator: all offer interesting possibilities, and the choice seems to matter.
First there is a loyalist family, Dutch and English, on a hefira from New York to Canada after the war has been lost. The opening of this section is gawky as public events obtrude, but once the narration has settled down to an account of one family's travails, everything works. No reader cares to know what the good bourgeoisie of New York thought of the rebels in Boston in 1775. But the technical difficulties of getting under a widow's skirts are timeless- ly fascinating, and not just because of prurience. It is one of the nicer treasures of Robertson Davies' beard to realise that the rumty-tumty of costume drama would probably be profoundly anaphrodisiac were we ever to see it, and not just because of the smells.
The next sections, in Wales, and then in Ontario, are quite magnificent. They show how the Protestant poor came to inherit such desirable tracts of the earth, and what happened to their Protestantism on the way. It is a magnificently stirring piece of romantic history, illuminated with flashes of pure horror and grotesquery.
And so to the present, and the curious resolution of the novel, after a wonderfully funny séance in which the furious ghost tries to denounce his real murderer to the medium, who takes no notice at all, being quite unable to hear him as she delivers her heartfelt banalities. Here the reviewer's craft must fail him. I feel like Mrs Salenius the medium, except that I know there is a 'How was it for you?' message that cannot be translated from the original somehere. To do this novel justice, one should re-read it after a year, before writing anything.
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