The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies

"Oh, somebody in a book! All you people like Nilla and the Cornishes and that man Darcourt seem to live out of books. As if everything was in books!"

"Well, Schnak, just about everything is in books. No, that's wrong. We recognize in books what we've met in life. But if you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You'd see a few things coming. About love, for instance."

The Lyre of Orpheus, the third book in Robertson Davies' "Cornish Trilogy," brings the story back to the characters of the first novel, The Rebel Angels. In the latter, a bunch of professorial types and arts patrons, including are trying to figure out how to deal with the estate of the late art critic Francis Cornish. The trilogy's middle book, What's Bred in the Bone, serves as a biography of Cornish, who turned out to be a successful faker of Renaissance art. Here, the patrons are back, and they've decided to spend some of their money on a young doctoral student named Hulda Schnakenburg, who wants to complete an unfinished opera about King Arthur by E. T. A. Hoffmann.

The third in a trilogy of trilogies: though Davies wrote a couple other, largely unheralded, toward the end of his life, it's tempting to see The Lyre of Orpheus as the rounding of a career. If that's so, I think I'm glad to put Davies away for a little while, though one day I might go and read those ancillary novels. The Lyre of Orpheus is just too Davies; all the magic and the tricks here are reduced, I felt, to their most recognizable forms. As with The Rebel Angels, the professors and the patrons are all exhaustingly alike, even though Davies takes care to sketch them with different temperaments: they all finish each other's quotations from Hoffmann, or Sir Walter Scott, or Keats, or wherever. Even the new characters, like the demanding lesbian doctoral adviser Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot, arrive on the scene knowing just how to play these literary games. The effect, after nine novels, is of an especially well-read man talking to himself. This is easy enough to ignore, even enjoy, when the novels provide real drama, but a novel about the staging of an opera is a hard ask. (It's also, I observe, strangely similar to the plot of A Mixture of Frailties, where another group of patrons pays for the education of a lower-class singer.)

Davies' novels all suggest the same relationship between life and art. In each book, there is a central work or story, and the events of the work exert some kind of explanatory power on the events of the novel. It's Jungian, maybe, or it's just what the Welsh actor Geraint Powell says to the beleaguered "Schnak," quoted above: "If you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it hadn't happened before." Here, it's the story of King Arthur that becomes manifested in the life of the characters, like an ur-myth emerging into life: Maria-slash-Guinevere allows herself to be briefly seduced by Geraint-slash-Lancelot, and ends up pregnant. They are both forgiven by Arthur-slash-Arthur, who is, like the Arthur in the play, the "magnanimous cuckold" whose generosity of spirit ennoble them all. (Never mind that this affair is out of character for Maria, and one of the falsest moments in all of Davies' books.) Davies loves to add a little spectral flourish, too. In What's Bred in the Bone, it's the pair of angels who bicker over Francis' soul; here, it's the spirit of E. T. A. Hoffmann, who looks down on the completion of his opera with excitement and trepidation.

The "Cornish Trilogy" is without a doubt the weakest of the three trilogies that Davies wrote. Yet, its middle book, with its exploration of art forgery and its traddy insistence that sometimes old forms are the best ones available to explore types of human feeling and experience we no longer pay attention to, is among Davies' best standalone novels. It's no coincidence, I think, that the most interesting parts of The Lyre of Orpheus have to do with Darcourt's discovery that the masterwork The Marriage at Cana is an original painting by Francis, and not from the 16th century, and his work revealing Francis' genius to the world at last. It made me wish The Lyre of Orpheus had a little bit more of Francis' spirit, and ability to find real truths in the falsehoods.

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Know this: After two years, the best parts of me are still frozen in the lake--my limbic system; its best friend, the prefrontal cortex; and the hollow, pumping organ in which I keep benevolence. The only one that regularly comes to visit it Akiwenzii. In the winter they park their truck on the ice, drill a hole with the auger in the ice and fish until the cold makes their bones crack. As soon as the ice is off the lake, Akiwenzii is back in their boat, with a torch and a sort of pitchfork for spearing pickerel. In the dead of summer, Akiwenzii sneaks back before first light in their canoe, before the cottagers and their jet skis are out. In the fall, they sprinkle tobacco around me and sing.

A figure named Mashkawaji lies frozen in a lake. Immobile, waiting, they watch their friends go about their lives. Each of these friends is also a representation of a part of Mashkawaji: the old man Akiwenzii is their will, the old woman Mindimooyenh their conscience, the maple tree Ninaatig their lungs, giant Sabe their marrow, Adik the caribou their nerves, and a pair of humans named Asin and Lucy, their brain. All these figures, who live in more-or-less contemporary urban Toronto, are described as "they," as Mashkawaji is, even when their gender is clear. They are all, in many ways, fluid, and the borders between their identities are porous. They are individuals, but also part of a whole, and Mashkawaji, perhaps, represents a way of being that binds them, one that is frozen, but waiting for a future in which the wholeness can be truly whole again.

Noopiming is what one might call "experimental" fiction. That describes the characters and their relationships--don't think too hard, for instance, about how a maple tree climbs aboard a boat, or goes shopping. But it also extends to the printed page: many of the pages of Noopiming are a single sentence long, oriented at the top of a long, blank page. This captures Mashkawaji's plodding, patient perspective, but I imagine it must have spurred some cost-benefit analysis at the University of Minnesota Press. The reader is forced to slow down, to take each idea as it comes, and not get caught up, perhaps, in the bustling urban life that surrounds the characters. It sits sometimes in pleasant tension with the novel's contemporary language, and sometimes exposes it as clunky or silly. And sometimes one turns the page to find pure cringe, as when we learn the old woman Mindimooyenh as her "notifications turned on for Palestine." OK.

Noopiming didn't quite work for me. I liked best the character Asin, who spends his days at Tommy Thompson Park on Toronto's Lake Erie Shore, birding. Asin is not interested in expanding his life list (to each their own), but they must rely on eBird like the other birders; they, unlike Akiwenzii and Mindimooyenh, have lost the natural connection to the cycles of the earth that would tell them when the birds will arrive and when they will depart. As the book expands, it takes on additional consciouses, like that of Esiban the porcupine. I liked the long(-ish) discussion by a group of Canada Geese planning for their migration. Though it's not said, we are perhaps asked to imagine that these, too, are manifestations of Mashkawaji, parts of the frozen whole.

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.