About reading

“In this first book of Davies’ trilogy, a snowball aimed at Ramsay by his childhood friend Percy Boyd Staunton hits the pregnant Mrs. Dempster. Mrs. Dempster gives birth to Paul prematurely, and Ramsay finds himself feeling guilty over Paul’s condition and Mrs. Dempster’s subsequent decline. Ramsay develops an obsession with the Dempsters, although he seems unable to help them. Eventually, Paul Dempster runs away. Ramsay also leaves the small Canadian town where he grows up. He fights in the war and returns to teach. He develops an interest in hagiography and travels the world in search of icons of saints. In his travels, he encounters the unusual heiress Liesl and a famous illusionist. Ramsay’s childhood friend Percy Boyd Staunton has become an important and powerful man in Canada, although it is clear that both he and Ramsay still hide secrets and buried pain from the past. As Ramsay uncovers his own history, he also finds the true cruelty and true vulnerability of Staunton.”
A. Antonow, Resident Scholar

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• The story would have developed in a different way if Dunstan had said that it was Percy who threw the snowball.
• Many of the characters in Fifth Business change their names. Dunstable Ramsay becomes Dunstan, Percy Boyd Staunton becomes Boy Staunton, Paul Dempster becomes Faustus Legrand and later Magnus Eisengrim. What happens when each of them is “born again”?
• Read this extract from the book and explain whether Dunstan is the fifth business or not. We have the other key figures:  the soprano and tenor figures in Lisle’s image, are Boy Staughton and Paul Dempster ; the first a figure of power, wealth and control, the latter a dark figure, magician, man seemingly with little heart.

“Who are you? Where do you fit into poetry and myth? Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business. “You don’t know what that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna — always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.
“So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero’s birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody’s death if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices. Are you Fifth Business? You had better find out.”

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