The Manticore by Robertson Davies
November 25th 2006 06:06
The Manticore by Robertson Davies
The Manticore starts where Fifth Business left off. Staunton was found dead in his car, with a big stone in his mouth. Police and Dunstable Ramsay are less than happy with Magnus's explanation but they can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, a mild crisis is provoked when Staunton's son David shouts that Magnus is a murdererer during one of his performances.
David is the hero of the novel and he begins by telling us the comedy around Staunton's funeral. But, once he loses control in that auditorium, David realises that he needs therapy and goes to Switzerland, for a treatment of Jungian analysis.
David is told by his analyst to keep a diary and it is these long sessions with his beautiful therapist that form the crux of the novel. As David goes back and forth about his life, his tense relationship with his dad, his lifelong chastity come to the fore. This is also simultaneously cast in a Jungian mould and we see an interesting man wrestling with his own demons.After the treatment, David meets the menage a trois of Dunstable Ramsay, his old schoolteacher, Magnus Eisengreim, the suspected killer of his father and Liesl, their common mistress.
I think this is the best novel of the series and a very good novel generally. It is also the best case Davies has made of his world view. Just as in Jungian pscychology, we are told to make peace with our Shadow, the other self which we have repressed, Davies wants us to make peace with that old repressed self, the one which believed in magic and wonder, before we crushed it in favour of common rationality.
The man dying with a stone in his mouth is a practice described in Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic. The Manticore is one of the Jungian symbols but it is also a medieval monster that has been imported into Christian myths and folklore from India. These were symbols incorporated into the Western thought in a post-Enlightement phase of heightened Orientalism. Like the predecessors ( Spengler, Jung) he admires so much, Davies too is waging a battle against what's left of Enlightenment in the West.
As I have said previously, Davies preserves his mask successfully and so he can argue for this viewpoint without producing a backlash from our rational self. In his other works, the mask slips off and Davies comes across as a man possesed with more invective and animus against science and modernity than is apparent in this novel.
The Manticore is probably his best-modulated and best-written work and that is why, it is a pleasure to read and recommend.
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