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.