With Fifth Business, he plumbed new artistic and spiritual depths. He had struck a note near Mark Twain in his portrayal of small-town culture, satirizing the residents' pious absurdities without seeming cruel, dramatizing their dreams and good intentions without becoming sentimental. When the book appeared in 1970, he had already published the three books of his Salterton Trilogy, which won him recognition in his native Canada as an incisive cultural critic and an endlessly entertaining novelist. Myth, magic, and miracles, freaks, saints, and devils-such is the world of wonders unleashed by a simple snowball thrown in the village of Deptford in 1908.įifth Business is Davies's masterwork, the book that cemented his reputation as one of the great storytellers of our time. "We move through a throng of Sleeping Princesses, Belles Dames sans merci, Cinderellas, Wicked Witches, Powerful Wizards, Frog Princes, Lucky Third Sons, Ogres, Dwarves, Sagacious Animal Helpers and Servers, yes and Heroes and Heroines, in a world that is nothing less than an enchanted landscape."
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