Customer Reviews

The Cornish Trilogy

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While my favorite novel by Robertson Davies remains Fifth Business, a book so dazzling it leaves me almost speechless, I feel the three novels of The Cornish Trilogy--The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus--are more satisfying in the aggregate than The Deptford Trilogy. The middle novel, What's Bred in the Bone, is the lynchpin of the trilogy--the "biography" of Francis Cornish, a wealthy art collector and restorer who in time will be suspected of being an art forger, but who in reality is a great artist of high inward purpose. To remind us of Mark Twain's dictum that a man's true biography is what goes on in his own mind, the book is narrated by the two invisible spirits who served as Cornish's guardians on Earth--the only ones who will ever know the whole truth about him. What's Bred in the Bone is sandwiched in between The Rebel Angels, about mayhem and skulduggery among a group of academics when they inherit the bountiful legacy of the late Francis Cornish, and The Lyre of Orpheus, concerning the convoluted doings when a young musical genius tries to recreate an unfinished opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann. This book features a particularly rollicking gang of characters, including E.T.A. Hoffmann himself speaking from the grave. Davies' style glistens with his trademark scholarship and wit; his Jungian philosophy, deep spirituality and often profound insights into the artistic process make these novels important works of art as well as delightful semi-satiric, semi-fantasy romps. One major complaint I have about Davies is that all his characters tend to sound like erudite, well-settled, middle-aged men--fine for the Rev. Simon Darcourt, but not for Maria Theotoky Cornish, the 23-year-old, half-Gypsy beauty. Also, some of his set pieces simply go on too long, such as the contentious "Arthurian" dinner party thrown by Arthur and Maria Cornish. However, the totality of Davies' gifts is so enormous that I'm willing to forgive him his flaws.

Robertson Davies writes like a friendly, jocose composite of every college professor you've ever had. Like Rabelais, the French Renaissance scholar who is one of the many subjects of "The Cornish Trilogy," he is amazingly learned and uses his fiction to display the staggering expanse of his knowledge, but he understands the inherent joy in reading and learning and balances his writing with equal measures of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow humor.

These three novels revolve around a man named Francis Cornish whose wealth, talent, and connections elevate his uncommonly consequential life almost to the status of an Ontario folk legend. Growing up in a rural town called Blairlogie, he develops a sensibility for the power of visual images and becomes an artist and an art connoisseur, educating himself at the University of Toronto's College of St. John and the Holy Ghost, affectionately called Spook. After working as an art assessor and spying for the British from a Bavarian castle during World War II, he spends the rest of his life amassing a tremendous collection of art, books, and manuscripts, which he leaves to Spook and other Canadian institutes upon his death.

The trilogy's second novel, "What's Bred in the Bone," in which Cornish's life story is narrated by a Recording Angel, is like the gentle, reflective adagio of a three-movement symphony. By contrast, the first novel, "The Rebel Angels," in which three Spook professors, the executors of Cornish's will, are assigned to catalogue and distribute the bequeathal, is in a modern Rabelaisian spirit: erudite, bawdy, and perverse. The discovery of an unknown Rabelais manuscript leads to an academic uproar among Clement Hollier, his nubile graduate student Maria, and his obnoxious rival Urquhart McVarish, whose tea-time companion, the boorish ex-monk John Parlabane, will do literally anything to get his unreadable autobiographical novel published.

The third novel, "The Lyre of Orpheus," concerns itself with an unfinished opera about King Arthur by E.T.A. Hoffmann which is found among Cornish's manuscripts. As a tribute to their benefactor, the Cornish Foundation allows to have the opera completed by a filthy waif of a girl who goes by the name of Schnak and is being hailed as a musical prodigy, with the libretto penned by Simon Darcourt, Spook's resident Anglican priest. The proceedings are annotated by none other than the ghost of Hoffmann himself, trapped in Limbo because he was unable to complete his Arthurian opera, and the Cornish Foundation's effort is his only chance to pass on to the next world. As the fledgling opera goes into production, Davies gives a brilliantly colorful account of the stormy dramas and passions involved in the world of musical theater.

These novels are broad satires of the worlds of academics, art, and music, respectively, and the main characters are so fatuously self-important they almost dare the reader to hate them. The general theme is the imagined conflict between the artist and the philistine, illustrated by Hoffmann's Johannes Kreisler/Tomcat Murr alter egos, but this imaginary line is only as thick as we make it. If, as Hoffmann's ghost says, a philistine is someone who is content to live in a wholly unexplored world, then Davies's "Cornish" trilogy acts wonderfully as an antiphilistine corrective.

This review is about "The Lyre of Orpheus," the third book in The Cornish Trilogy, and a work that merits more comment than a previous reviewer's "unremarkable." Davies is one of my favorite writers. His "The Cunning Man" is excellent - a yarn within a yarn, as I've said elsewhere. "Lyre" is similar in style. Reading a Davies novel is a pastime, more rewarding than at first glance, like doing large tabletop puzzles. His characters are archetypes, and his stories repeat patterns like waltzes. The unfolding of the patterns is a reading pleasure. In "Lyre," The Cornish Foundation sponsors an opera about King Arthur. The head of the Foundation is named Arthur, and the opera and our narrative follow parallel story lines. Another element to the puzzle appears. The opera is to be staged in the 19th-century style, while a deliberately anachronistic painting enters the drama. This device abounds in Davies' novels. As a reader, you start in the middle of the onion layers and work both ways, inward to the center, penetrating the simpler layers (Arthur and Arthur), and outward from the dramatic action, finding the themes (how many anachronisms are there?), pleased as when while listening to music a melody reappears, transformed. The transformations can be as pleasant as the melody. "Lyre" isn't my favorite Davies' work, but it has the familiar elements for which I return again and again.

In most reviews I would say "read if you like this sort of thing." Not this time. Read. Put down your Anne Rice or Don DeLillo for a moment. Make a glass of lemonade and sit at the table. It will do you good to work at a puzzle for a change.

Robertson Davies' greatest strength has always been in his ability to create a protagonist whose adventures quickly intrigue you. One can debate the virtues of each novel in this trilogy, but the simple fact remains that as parts of a trilogy the story remains incomplete without reading all three.

Stories as intriguing as this do not often appear. You will travel between a thinly veiled Toronto and war-torn Europe, through generations of a family and across decades of time. A master storyteller, you will need to pay close attention (perhaps create a family tree) to understand how everyone fits together. The literary allusions could have you researching for months, and pepper the pages with just enough spice to add creedence to the education levels of the characters.

The main thread that ties all three books together is the main character, Reverend Simon Darcourt, who is on a quest to write the biography of a philanthropist with whom he was acquainted. To say that this is the entire story would be a gross understatement. The plot leaves few stones unturned in the lives of its characters, who three-dimensionally number in the dozens.

Give yourself a lot of time to read this book, because once you start you won't be able to put it down.

Robertson Davies is one of the most erudite authors you will ever read. The sheer volume of his knowledge staggers me, his use of the English language leaves me green with envy. However, unlike Umberto Eco in "Foucalt's Pendulum" Davies' erudition is used, not to bludgeon the reader into awed submission, but to enrich. Davies' books are primarily great fun, his characters live, his stories grip, his descriptions evoke and his wit lightens. He is always a treat, and is one of those people whose name, whenever I read it, makes me smile.

Buy this trilogy and you will very likely find these three stories among the best you have ever read. If you just buy "What's Bred in the Bone" you will become addicted and have to buy "The Rebel Angels" and "The Lyre of Orpheus" anyway, so save time and effort and buy this trilogy. Then buy the Salterton Trilogy and the Deptford Trilogy and everything else he ever wrote. If you have never read Robertson Davies you have a wonderful treat in store, I envy you.

Davies's Cornish trilogy should be read by anyone with an interest in the philosophy of art -- questions of attribution, forgery and fakery, and authenticity pervade all three novels, which deal with literature, painting and music respectively. Art in general, and art objects in particular, take on a shadowy, slippery aspect in spite of the very palpable (and almost erotically desirable) qualities they have for Davies's characters. Aesthetic and spiritual experience are intertwined. But the style, while elevated, is never dry or preachy -- the characters are rounded and often delightfully vulgar and even the most intellectual threads of the story are brimming with life and humour.

After being so thoroughly delighted with Davies' Deptford trilogy, I immediately purchased this collection (it was a choice between the Cornish and the Salterton trilogy, and the Cornish won because (1) Dwight Brown recommended it and (2) the store had it). Like the Deptford trilogy, the Cornish trilogy revolves around a single character, but it works its way through the lives of many others as well.

In a sense, The Rebel Angels is two novellas that are split into the same number of chapters that you bounce between. "Second Paradise" is the story of Maria Theotoky, a PhD candidate studying the works of Rabelais, who finds herself drawn into the life of returned professor turned monk, John Parlabane. But the real issue is a secret manuscript that was purchased by the recently deceased Francis Cornish, whom her advisor, as one-third executor of Cornish's estate, has promised to her as the substance for her doctorate. Unfortunately, the manuscript has vanished. "The New Aubrey" is told from the point of view of Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt, another third of the multi-headed Cornish executors, who is also a professor's of Maria's and an old friend of Parlabane's. Darcourt has decided to work on a biography of the university professors in the style of Aubrey, and thinks he has plenty to work with in Clem Hollier (Maria's advisor), Parlabane, and the last third of the executors, Urky McVarish. Confused? You won't be, because Davies is a master at handling the many threads of the story, and nothing is ever mis-placed. As in the Deptford trilogy, nothing "fantastic" occurs, although the secret manuscript is definitely a fictional device and not something that exists in our world. Maria's mother, however, is of the old-world gypsies, and there's a few scenes in which she shows Hollier some gypsy "magic" and fortune-telling, but in each of these cases, one can suppose that nothing extra-worldly is occurring. And, yes, there is a tie between The Rebel Angels and the Deptford books--Parlabane and Hollier are said to have attended school with David Staunton, the subject of The Manticore.

The second book, What's Bred in the Bone, definately throws in the fantastic. After a prologue in which the characters from The Rebel Angels, who have formed a trust fund for the use of Francis Cornish's fortune to promote art, talk about the biography that Darcourt is trying to write of Cornish. From this, two angels (the Lesser Zadkiel, Angel of Biography, and his brother, the Daimon Maimas, Cornish's personal fiend), take over to tell the story of Cornish from his beginning as scion of the richest family in town, through his introduction to art by a singular book, his religious duology by his Catholic great-aunt and Protestant housekeeper, the art instruction by combining what he learned in the book with the subjects of the local morgue. Then it's off to boy's school in which he becomes a pupil of Dunstan Ramsay (the Fifth Business from the book of that name) for a time, then gets drawn into his father's business as an English spy. All along it is art that imbues him (what is bred in the bone, as the title says), that strengthens him, and, in the end, that sustains him.

The final book picks up where the first book left off, with the Cornish Trust board of directors, Hollier, Darcourt, Maria, Arthur Cornish, and Geraint Powell, deciding to stage a reconstructed opera by one of the university students, even though there is no libretto and the student is a doctoral candidate who has never attempted something of this magnitude before. The opera, an unfinished piece by E.T.A. Hoffman, is Arthur, or The Magnanimous Cuckold, an attempt to put the story of King Arthur as a true opera (rather than the singing in a story of Camelot). The student, Schnak, they soon discover is a belligerent and odiferous genius, but nothing compared to the special advisor that is brought in from Sweden, Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot. Darcourt, meanwhile, is frustrated because he is having little luck completing the biography of Francis Cornish, and now is tagged to write a libretto for this opera. Everything comes together, although never in quite the way you expect it to, which is the beauty of Davies' novels.

To say that I like Robertson Davies would be an understatement. He has, as I've said to Jill, become an obsession. I have purchased the Salterton trilogy, which is begging from the shelf to be read, and I expect that you will see mention of it in the next installment. I am, however, saddened. Davies died about six years ago, and I know the limits of my obsession as those few books that I have yet to read. One side of me says to savor the moment, the opportunity to read them from a fresh perspective, while the reckless side of me is urging for me to get on with the business as I'm not getting any younger.

Robertson Davies was totally unknown to me when I found this book in the Staff's recommendations at a Nebula bookstore. I picked up and devoured it.

Since then, I have found out that his work is studied in English Canadian High Schools, and for at least once in my life I wish I had had an English education instead of a French one. And then again, maybe not.

Why the ambivalence? Because I wish I had read this book long before, and at the same time I wish I had never read it so I could start all over again and discover Mr. Davies to live the amazement of the first read.

Enthralling, exhilarating, witty, beautiful ... wonderful.

I absolutely loved the Deptford Trilogy, so I naturally couldn't wait to devour the Cornish Trilogy, and The Rebel Angels, the first book, did not disappoint. To me, The Rebel Angels was on par with Deptford. The Rebel Angels had manifold intriguing characters and story-lines and mysteries (just like Deptford) that I thought would only get better throughout the Trilogy. Some of the most interesting things about The Rebel Angels were Davies' allusions and references to alchemy and his uncanny sensibilty for the mysterious. All in all, it's a great peek into the teeming world of academia at its most exciting and spell-binding. And I wouldn't imagine that it is an easy task to make academia exciting. Next comes What's Bred in the Bone, and all and all, it was good, but there was one aspect to it that made me want to scream in exasperation. Davies, unfortuneately used an absolutely ridiculous, silly, and down-right ludicrous narrative device in the form of two "biographer angels" that apparently were dreamed up sometime during the Middle Ages. These two biographer angels interrupt the main story at the end of the chapters to basically insult the reader by explaining certain aspects of the story. I couldn't believe Davies used this in an other-wise worthy novel. When these two angels made their first appearance, wholly out of no-where, I had to restrain myself from throwing the book across the room in exasperation. And as for the third novel, The Lyre of Orpheus, let's just say that it must've been Davies' first novel that he never had published, because it seemed to be the work of a second-rate author, something that Davies certainly is not. It also used a similarly ludicrous plot device as the biographer angels, only this time it is a long-dead 2nd rate composer from the 19th century chiming in with his entirely inappropriate commentary about his life and about the events of the main story. I don't know what Davies was thinking.....and as for the main story, it is at times interesting, but it tends to hit the reader over the head with its Arthurian allusions. Also, it leaves a great many questions posed in the first and second novels unanswered, especially from the first novel, being that the first and third novels take place after the second novel. That was what disappointed me the most about the third novel. Instead of focusing on some of the stupendous characters brought into play in the first novel and digging further into their stories, Davies chose to push aside (or eliminate) many of the best characters from the first novel and even bring in a few characters to be center-pieces which didn't hold my interest nearly as much. All in all, I think the Cornish Trilogy, to me, represents many missed chances. It could've been just as could as the Deptford Trilogy all throughout, but i don't know what happened. I don't regret having read it, but my advice would be to read it before the Deptford Trilogy, so you can save the best for last and truly be dazzled by the highly superior trilogy. I would give The Rebel Angels 4 and a half stars by itself, 3 and a half (maybe just 3 stars) to What's Bred in the Bone (those angels really bugged the hell out of me), and 2 stars to The Lyre of Orpheus, so that evens out to about three stars total. (By the way, I have not yet read the Salterton Trilogy, so i cannot make any comparisons in this regard. I will read it shortly, though)

These are wonderful books, i like the way Davies makes each of them a stand alone novel in its own right, as well as part of a series- and i should know, having read the Lyre of Orpheus first, then What's Bred in the Bone, and finishing with the first. The stories don't always go where you expect, which is one of the best parts, but they are fascinating views.