Summer Reading

I am reading two books at present, both novels in the first person: Anthony Powell's The Acceptance World (1955) and Robertson Davies's Fifth Business (1970). In the former, the title first appears on Page 51, when we are told the name of a credit broker, leaving us to consider the metaphor. In the latter, the title is supplied up front: a definition following the colophon page: the Fifth Business is "neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement."

Powell's story its great reading, particularly for those who enjoy the portraits of Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and are interested in the English middle-class character, something that became apparent when its narrator, Nicholas, goes to the Ritz to meet Mark Members on a literary errand and, while waiting for him, encounters acquaintances (never friends, for the middle-class don't have any) from his public school and undergraduate university days, the most finely-drawn being Peter Templer, who is like so many fathers and sons I knew growing up in the British city of Vancouver. 

Davies's book was a last-second purchase from a shop that escapes me, a book I had known of all my life and assumed was about journalists (I'd conflated it with "fifth estate"). But as is the case with a lot of "memorable" first wave (post-1958) CanLit, Fifth Business is about what all first wave CanLit is about, and that is growing up; not as a boy (as in W. O. Mitchell's Prairie farm community or in Mordecai Richler's big Eastern Canadian city), but in a village somewhere in Southern Ontario. The story of a life that begins at ten with the hastened birth of another -- hastened in the Canadian way, through an "act" of changing weather: a snowball thrown at our protagonist that hits a minister's wife at the back of the neck and drops her, causing the child she is carrying to be born "eighty days" early "and looked so wretched that the doctor and my mother were frightened."