Customer Reviews

Whats Bred In the Bone

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the first book by Davies I ever read, and it remains my favourite. As I found out later, it is the centrepiece of what came to be known as the Cornish trilogy. It is the story of Francis Cornish, a talented artist from provincial Canada who is recruited into the British secret service and participates in a major art forging operation intended to thwart the nazis. In the course of the process he finds and loses the love of his life, paints a medieval tryptich depicting the Marriage at Canaan that is also a representation of the major figures in his life (all of them very colourful), unmasks another forger after the war and ultimately has to give up his career as a "medieval painter" when his masterpiece is purchased by a Canadian museum on the assumption that it is genuine. Cornish's life is narrated by his daimon, a sort of "biographical angel", and has many more twists and turns than I can possibly describe here. The book is full of Davies' urbane wit and Jungian wisdom. It tails off a bit towards the end, but that is compensated in the "sequel" about his nephew Arthur and his patronage of the arts, "The Lyre of Orpheus". Highly recommended, but I suggest you start with the first part of this trilogy, "The Rebel Angels". Newcomers, beware: Davies' fiction is highly addictive.

I didn't realize this was the middle book of the Cornish trilogy and read it first. I haven't read the other two yet, but I have to say that this book is excellent and one of the most entertaining books I have read this year. This book chronicles the odd adventures of Francis Cornish in a sweeping story which moves from Canada to Europe. Francis Cornish is just enough unlucky that you sympathize with his trials and tribulations, but his fantastic artistic skills and his many riches make him someone the reader might envy and not understand. Davies is an expert at telling this sort of life story, and I think this one is even more enjoyable than Fifth Business. He has a sense of what it is like to have characters at the hands of fate; in this novel, the daimons quite literally command and shape Francis's destiny. Reading this book definitely wanted to make me read the rest of the trilogy.

Davies always anchors his world in the primal instincts, the truths of human nature. You are never quite prepared for the surprising complexity of his characters or the fate that awaits them. The realistic evolution of Francis from troubled boyhood to artistic savant is really a modern version of David Copperfield, except the female characters are more fully dimensioned than Dickens could ever manage. And there is nothing of Dicken's stuffiness here. This is great literature with a Monty Python flair. No matter how you slice it a convincing argument can be made that during the last ten years of his life Davies was the greatest living novelist writing in English.

What's bred in the bone will out in the flesh, the saying goes. Sheer genius must have composed the vast mass of Robertson Davies' bones. This wonderfully witty novel is typical of Davies' brilliant, erudite & gripping style. It left me aghast with wonder that one man can know so much, cover it so well and tie his references together and all the while remain hugely entertaining. This is the middle part of the Cornish Trilogy and as stunning as the other two. Two angels discuss the life of a deceased art collector and philanthropist and flashbacks show how the young man came to be widely respected from a life as an art forger. If you haven't already read "The Rebel Angels" do it, If you have, you have no need to read further, you will want to buy this book anyway. This is one of the best books I have ever read and Robertson Davies is one of the greats.

I didn't know of Davies' history - except that he went to UCC and Queens and UofT - and that he was a wonderful storyteller.

What's Bred in the Bone tells the story of Francis Cornish, beginning with his birth and childhood in Blairlogie. As I read on, I soon realized that Blairlogie was in fact Renfrew Ontario, my hometown... I didn't know how he had been able to describe my hometown so well, but I was knew it was Renfrew - physically, historically, economically and personally.

I later learned that Davies had been able to draw such a devastatingly clear, ironic and satirical portrait of Renfrew, because he too grew up there. He attended the same public school as me (although we had proper plumbing by the time I went there) and attended the same church. The story is populated with Renfrew names... Cornish was the Anglican Minister, Froats - the Monument Maker - and so on.

It is a wonderful story - and all the more so because Renfrew continues with much the same social system, which includes an annual "Lumber Baron Days," while ignoring the wonderful love letter from a homegrown son. Too Rich!

I first read this book about 20 years ago. I still remember it vividly. Francis Cheggin Cornish seems less like a fictional character to me than a real person a favorite uncle told me stories about. Actually, that's as apt a description of Davies as a novelist/persona I can think of.

At the simplest level, this book is about the life of an artist -- but that gross simplification doesn't even scratch the surface of Davies' rich exercise in fictionalized biography. To me, this book is nothing less than a contemplation of how life experience makes a person what they are. A simple enough idea, but one that opens up to infinite complexities. It is rare to encounter a life (real or imagined) unspooled with such fascinating lucidity and a deft insight.

What's that mean? Basically, Davies' writes about the character Francis Cornish in a way that draws you in at every level. By the end, you will feel as if you KNOW him. Again, it sounds like a simple literary idea -- fictionalized biography -- but you feel free to hunt around for other examples as good as this. You won't be finding many, I'd be so bold to wager.

This is the "middle" book of Davies' Cornish Trilogy (my favorite of his trilogy of trilogies, though you can't go wrong with any of 'em) though, chronologically, the first in the story. I read it that way, way back when, and I actually recommend that. Maybe I'm off-base here but I think the first book (The Rebel Angels) works better when you know this one, regardless of the order Davies wrote the works in. I dunno. You decide.

Anyway, a heck of a book. A heck of writer. Can't recommend it enough.

-- mm

What's Bred in the Bone is the one true stand-alone novel in the Cornish Trilogy. This middle volume is a superb telling of the life of Francis Cornish, the hinge upon whom all of the trilogy is supported. Some elements of the story are clearly reminiscent (to readers of Davies) of his earlier book, Fifth Business. But this is no mere reworking of an old theme. There is a freshness to this novel that makes for a story well worth the read.

This book takes the reader back into rural Ontario of the early 20th century, filling us with fictionalized visions of Davies's own childhood. Lest that be off-putting to some, however, it should be noted that this is a novel that also takes the main character to far away Europe, into the intrigues of war, and the mysteries of forged (and not-quite-forged) artworks. What this story misses, relative to the first and third books of the trilogy, is the spice given to us by Maria's mother and uncle, who are absent here. Theirs is the archetypal energy that finds no true parallel in this book. The reader is compensated for this absence, however, by the personage of the coachman/undertaker, a rich character indeed!

I give this book my solid and hearty recommendation. It is suitable for anyone interested in reading a book by this master of the pen, whether or not they care to read the other volumes of the trilogy (though I sincerely hope that you will read the other books!). Superb.

Robertson Davies spins a marvelous tale about the fine connections between seemingly inconsequential choices. Through a dynamic character study of the protagonist, Francis Cornish, Davies draws thoughtful conclusions about the tension between nature and nurture. Davies employs the fanciful device of angels known as daimons who cast obstacles and options in young Francis' path. Francis' decisions plague and guide him through a fascinating life lived in Canada, Austria and England. With careful attention paid to the details of religion and art and their intersections in society, Davies produces a magnificent work of literary greatness.

Robertson Davies is simply one of the best story-tellers who ever lived and this is, I think, his best story. Although the middle installment of the Cornish Trilogy (in between Rebel Angels and The Lyre of Orpheus), it stands by itself as a work of fiction. Davies does a ingenious job of weaving history with fable and the compassion he feels for his characters comes through on every page. This is one book you won't regret taking a chance on.

Robertson Davies published this middle volume of his "Cornish Trilogy" in 1985. Six years earlier, Sir Anthony Blunt, Britain's leading art historian (and briefly one of my own professors), had been exposed as a Soviet spy. I very much suspect that the surprising conjunction of clandestine operative and connoisseur was in Davies' mind when he planned this book. It is the fictional life story of Francis Cornish, maverick member of a Canadian banking family, who has recently died in possession of large art collection, a great deal of money, and a general air of mystery. Framed by brief comments from his guiding angel, the book tells of his growing up in a Canadian lumber town, his developing interest in art, his somewhat secretive work as an art restorer, and his long association with what is always referred to as "the profession" -- the British intelligence apparatus.

It must be thirty years since I last read a Robertson Davies book. I had forgotten his curiously dated air, like a nineteenth-century novelist (Trollope perhaps) writing in the twentieth, full of detail and with ample diversions. But that is soon forgotten in an entertaining and often racy Bildungsroman, taking Francis from remote Blairlogie to boarding school and college in Toronto, and thence to Oxford. By the time he graduates, we are on page 284 of a 436-page novel, or exactly two-thirds of the way through. Hence the strange title, from an old proverb: "What's bred in the bone will not out of the flesh" -- the implication being that you cannot understand a person until you know his formation. And indeed even for the next 80 pages, Francis is still pursuing an apprenticeship, this time to a brilliant but tyrannical restorer named Tancredo Saraceni, who is restoring (or repainting) renaissance pictures in a baronial Schloss in Germany as part of a scheme to defraud the Third Reich.

But Francis' formation is not followed by an equivalent fruition; his life-story as an adult is less interesting than when he was growing up. The story attenuates as the various themes of his youth are pulled together philosophically, in the iconography of pictures he paints in imitation of the old masters, and the interleaving of elements of the Grail legend with his own life. This is clearly a preoccupation of the author's; the third novel in the trilogy, THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS, though about music rather than painting, is also concerned with retouching old art works and replaying the Arthurian legend. Perhaps it is what Davies fans expect, but for me it merely replaced human interest with philosophical game-playing. The author certainly knows his stuff, whether it is the pigments, supports, and media of the old masters here, or the process of putting together an opera in THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS. Yet just having come from reading a totally convincing novel about a painter, MY NAME IS ASHER LEV by Chaim Potok, I found I simply could not believe in Francis' artistic ability in this book, any more that I could believe the composer in the other. There is certainly an intellectual fascination, but not so much as in Michael Frayn's HEADLONG, about a possibly forged Bruegel. Thirty years ago, Robertson Davies was all the rage; he remains interesting today, but would he still be rated among the top Canadian authors?