World of Wonders by Robertson Davies

'In those years I formed a very low idea of crowds.  And of all those who pressed near me the ones I hated most, and wished the worst luck,were the young, the lovers, who were free and happy.  Sex to me meant terrible bouts with Willard and the grubby seductions of Charlie.  I did not believe in the happiness or the innocence or the good will of the couples who came to the fair for a good time.  My reasoning was simple, and of a very common kind: if I were a hoor and a crook, were not whoredom and dishonesty the very foundations on which humanity rested?  If I were at the outs with God--and God never ceased to trouble my mind--was anyone else near Him?  If they were, they must be cheating.  I very soon came to forget it was I who was the prisoner: I was the one who saw clearly and saw the truth because I saw without being seen.  Abdullah was the face I presented to the world, and I knew that Abdullah, the undefeated, was worth no more than I.'

Robertson Davies' Fifth Business tells the story of three men whose lives are intertwined, thanks to a single act done when they were boys: Boy Staunton throws a snowball with a rock in it; Dunstan Ramsay ducks, and the rock hits the pregnant mother of Paul Dempster, leading to her premature birth and mental decline.  We learn in that novel that Dempster grows up to be the famous magician Magnus Eisengrim, and when Boy and Magnus meet again for the first time since their childhood, Boy ends up dead in a river with the offending rock in his mouth.  It's a great, fitting circle, and a victim of its own success: the two subsequent novels in the trilogy, The Manticore and World of Wonders, seem extraneous to the completeness of Fifth Business.  They try to extend that novel in two very different, neither considerably successful, ways: The Manticore by following Boy's son David, and World of Wonders by backtracking and filling in the life of Paul, who disappeared and became Magnus.

Davies sets that story up this way: Magnus, living with Ramsay and their shared lover (!) Liesl in a Swiss castle, is asked to star in a movie about the legendary French magician Robert-Houdin.  The filmmaker, a Swede named Lind, pushes Magnus to divulge his own history as "subtext" for the film, and so over the course of several nights, Magnus finally tells his own story.  As a setup, it reminds me of the kind of "gaffing," or contrived trickery, that is used in the circus world that Magnus describes, or perhaps the elaborate clockwork of Robert-Houdin's tricks, which Magnus criticizes.  The parts between Magnus' tales, during which Lind, Ramsay, Liesel, and other characters associated with the film, discuss and reflect on what they've heard, are stiff and talky.  Davies' writing always has a stage-y quality to it; characters easily become ciphers in a Socratic dialogue rather than people.

But Magnus' story can be compelling.  He describes how, having snuck out of the house to visit the circus, he becomes enamored with the illusions of a sideshow magician named Willard the Wizard.  He hangs around the tent so he can show his own magic trick to Willard, and Willard responds by guiding the young Paul Dempster to a bathroom where--yes, yikes, wait for it--he sodomizes him.  This brutal act is Paul's initiation into the circus world, into which he is kidnapped by a fearful Willard and a bunch of hardscrabble associates, who don't approve of Willard's actions, exactly, but who have their own kind of investment in making sure the traveling act doesn't unravel, and so look the other way.  Paul is taught to control a giant papier-mache automaton named Abdullah who does card tricks, and it's in the darkness of Abdullah that he learns to hone his skills at magic.

The World of Wonders is a compelling but frightening operation, filled with well-drawn characters: the cruel Willard, the profligate barker Charlie, a masturbating orangutan named Rango, the kindly fortune teller Zingara, and a fat woman named Happy Hannah who berates her audience (and the poor victimized Paul) with Bible verses.  I found most of them far more clever, and more chilling, than any of the characters in Geek Love.  Together they provide young Paul with an unconventional, often horrifying childhood, but one with its own lessons about evil and human nature, and it's through the eyes of Abdullah that he learns how to observe people, and deceive them.

But the World of Wonders is only one half of the novel.  When Willard finally dies and the circus dissipates, Paul--who over the course of the novel goes by at least a half-dozen pseudonyms, and is never really "Paul" again--is scooped up by a troupe of English actors, where he acts as a "double" for a famous but aging actor.  He walks tightropes, for example, when the no-longer-spry actor cannot, but he must be so convincing that he ends up being absorbed, or perhaps absorbing, the actor's existence.  We're meant to see it as another Abdullah--a kind of existence behind a mask or costume, a kind of disappearing act.  I didn't find this section nearly as engaging as the first; the patrician actor Sir John just isn't as interesting as the ghouls who fill the circus.

World of Wonders never finds the same kind of convincing circular logic as Fifth Business.  The part of Magnus' life in which he, with the help of Liesl, becomes the world-famous magician he is today, is sort of left out; detailed enough, perhaps, in the first novel.  Davies seems more interested in bringing the whole trilogy to a close, and ends by forcing us to revise our understanding of Fifth Business--namely, the suggestion that Magnus killed Boy.  The truth turns out to be more complex, but less interesting, and not really satisfying.