The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies

It's not that I wanted to know a great deal, in order to acquire what is now called expertise, and which enables one to become an expert-tease to people who don't know as much as you do about the tiny corner you have made your own. I hoped for a bigger fish; I wanted nothing less than Wisdom. In a modern university if you ask for knowledge they will provide it in almost any form--though if you ask for out-of-fashion things they may say, like the people in shops, 'Sorry, there's no call for it.' But if you ask for Wisdom--God save us all! What a show of modesty, what disclaimers from men and women from whose eyes intelligence shines forth like a lighthouse. Intelligence, yes, but of Wisdom not so much as the gleam of a single candle.

Maria Magdalena Theotoky is a grad student at the Toronto college of St. John and the Holy Ghost, affectionately called Spook. She's been made the research assistant of Prof. Clement Hollier, with whom she is madly in love, after a previous tryst on the professor's office couch, but her hopes to pursue their relationship further prove difficult: Hollier is taken up with the task of executing the will of another professor who left an enormous collection of manuscripts and artwork, along with two others: the insipid Urquhart McVarish (a Davies name if there ever was one) and the genial priest Simon Darcourt. While Hollier is away, Maria's new office is invaded by an old friend of Hollier's, a cruel and hideous genius of a defrocked monk named John Parlabane.

These characters make up The Rebel Angels, Davies' crack at the classic campus novel. Davies, who was the founding and longtime dean of the University of Toronto's Massey College, knew a thing or two about campus life, and The Rebel Angels beams with affection for the Life of the Mind that it provides. Maria's first-person chapters alternate with those of Darcourt, who tells us that he left a life of priestly service for the kind of mental and spiritual contemplation available to a university professor--a transition that both Darcourt and Davies admit is out of fashion, but indicative of the novel's ardor for what it sees as unfashionable and discarded Wisdom, capital W.

One of the central motifs of The Rebel Angels is poop. It is feces, for example, that animates the work of Spook's science superstar Ozy Froats, who insists that there is much to be learned about the nature of the human body by studying its waste. There is a prudish pushback to Froats' work, though this detail seems a little strange to me, given that stool samples have been an important part of medical testing for a long time. But Davies' point seems to be that the things we think are worthless are often anything but: Maria's mother, a Romany woman she calls "Mamusia," is a celebrated violin repairer whose secret trick is to pack old instruments carefully in goat manure. The Rebel Angels is a novel about the synthesis of dualities: mind and spirit, past and present, ego and id. Parlabane tells Maria that everyone has, like a tree, both a crown and root, and it is the root that provides sustenance to the crown; the former must be nurtured for the latter to grow. Our poop--the things we wish to bury or ignore--is what fertilizes us.

The Rebel Angels might be the most Davies-like of any of the Davies novels I've ever read. Though the characters are well-drawn and vivid enough, they are all wits, and they all talk like each other, which is to say they talk a lot, and they're always doing things like quoting Rabelais and Paracelsus, or finishing each other's quotes by Rabelais or Paracelsus, or telling each other they haven't quite understood what it was Rabelais and Paracelsus were talking about. As a novel, it tends toward fustiness, but it really shines when it focuses on Maria's Romany heritage and family, which is something she has yearned to hide from her more sophisticated university associates. Mamusia--secretive, superstitious, sly, larger-than-life--is also a font of wisdom, the kind of which is typically ignored by the university, and its the scenes with her and Maria's uncle Yerko where the novel really comes to life. I have no idea whether it's an honest or accurate depiction of Romany life, but it's certainly an affectionate one, and in its way it proves the central idea of the novel: Wisdom is often to be found in the places one least expects.