Dr. Hullah's casebook

    

     Reading Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man is like listening to the scintillating conversation of an eloquent, intelligent raconteur; it's stimulating, engrossing, wide-ranging and it never flags.

    As with Davies' Fifth Business, which I so enjoyed last year and whose hero, Dunstan Ramsay, makes a cameo appearance here, it's a first person narrative and in effect a life story. This time the narrator is Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a Toronto diagnostician of some renown but one whose methods raise an eyebrow or two among more conventional practitioners. Dr. Hullah understands that "... the close stitching of mind to body meant that each communicated its fortunes to the other", and while he has an unimpeachable grasp of medical science, that is coupled with a highly developed instinct and intuition for what really ails his patients and why. He's a very sympathetic character, cerebral, self-contained, companionable but independent of spirit, and around him are collected all manner of types who enrich the book and augment the plot, but whose roles as periferals are to reflect light back onto Hullah himself.

    He's the fascinating one, the cunning man of the title, and as the book allows him discourses on subjects from Freud to high Anglicanism, the illnesses and afflictions of characters in literature, philosophy, art and music, it is rich apparel in which he is clothed. That apart, the essence of the man - what he believes and his holistic approach to his calling - is described and recounted with great skill and was of especial interest to me.

   We often talk about books' opening lines (and this book has a good one), but its closing passage - which must be just as hard to do well - is perfect. No use my quoting it here as it would make no sense, so you must just go and read the book for yourself; it's not to be missed!  

Comments

[Lisa W]

I'm intrigued. Now I must go find my (very old!)copy of "The Cunning Man" to read that closing passage!