I wish I could now remember the order in which I first read the novels of Robertson Davies. I can’t. I think I might have read Fifth Business first, but I couldn’t swear to it. It’s perhaps more likely that I read the Cornish Trilogy first, or even that I read What’s Bred in the Bone first. Although, you know, Fifth Business is probably the one a fellow is most likely to read first, I suppose. I didn’t read the Salterton ones until later, I know that.
I mention it because I’m curious about my own fondness for his books. I am fond of them, very fond of them, but I find it difficult to say exactly why. Furthermore, I clearly read these books at a vulnerable point—whether that was my teenage years or my twenties or whatever—because it turns out upon rereading that I have repeated many of his observations as if they were my own. Observations with which I don’t agree, fairly often, when I see them again.
If I hadn’t read Fifth Business at some point, and enjoyed it, and if I hadn’t read a bunch of other Robertson Davies novels and enjoyed them, too, and I were to pick this book up now and read it (which I might very well not do, of course), would I enjoy it? Would I go on to his others?
I’m not talking about the thing that happens, not terribly often but I’m sure I could name a dozen titles, where I reread a book that I remember having enjoyed and I don’t enjoy it at all. Whether a second look exposes the flaws and Sources of Reader Irritation, or whether it’s that I am a different reader than I used to be (and I am, I am), a book that I had a fondness for is a book I now dislike. But as I say, that isn’t what has happened here—I enjoyed rereading Fifth Business; the Sources of Reader Pleasure have been joined by new Sources of Reader Irritation, but they have also been joined by new Sources of Reader Pleasure. I liked the book, I like the book, I hope to continue liking the book. But as one SRP is familiarity, and comfort of a sort, I wonder where the balance would fall without that, and with (very likely) the SRIs of disagreement and rejection of political/social/sexual/medical views would be greater if I first hit them now, when I am set in my mental ways.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.