What's Bred in the Bone

I first read Roberston Davies when I was a summer student working at a camp. In the evening we returned to our quarters and ate slabs of meat blackened in a cast-iron pan. Afterwards, while the rest played crib, I crawled into bed and read Fifth Business. The elegant prose warmed me as much as the food and the heat from an oil-burning space heater.

The narrator of Fifth Business, Dunstan Ramsay, makes a brief appearance in What's Bred in the Bone, a novel that was shortlisted for the Booker in 1986. It recounts the life of Francis Cornish, the much ignored son of a wealthy family. He spends his early life in rural Ontario, is educated at Oxford, becomes an artist, works for MI5 during and after WW2, and ends his years as a rich but odorous miser in Canada.

The title comes from an old proverb: “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.” For Francis, what’s bred in the bone is his upbringing in a loveless and hypocritical environment. His mother is presented at the court of Edward VII on her “coming-out,” after which she celebrates by having sex with a stranger. When her pregnancy is discovered, her father arranges a speedy marriage with a monocled major of “unimpeachable family descent.” The major agrees to the marriage after presenting an invoice for his services. The child, when born, is found to be mentally deficient -- the result of several comic attempts at inducing a miscarriage. The boy is kept locked in an upper room, cared for by a servant, until he dies.

Thus, the household that Francis grows up in is financially rich, yet morally impoverished, and gradually his own life takes on a similar aspect. His own marriage, for example, is a distorted reflection of his parents’. He is duped into the union by Ismay, his cousin, when she becomes pregnant. Only after they are married does she reveal the child is not his. Meanwhile, her family milks him for as much money as they can get, until Ismay “scarpers” off to Spain to be with the child’s father. Francis assumes financial responsibility for the child but nothing more.

Next, Francis’s lifelong dream to be an artist takes a wrong turn when he agrees to apprentice under Tancred Saraceni, whose métier is “improving” old paintings. One of Francis's duties involves exposing a fake work of art being promoted by a competitor – a fraud exposing a fraud – after which the competitor takes his own life.

The crowning irony of his life is the death of a dear friend, Aylwin Ross, who is director of the National Gallery in Ottawa. Ross asks for money to buy a painting for the museum, a purchase that would also save his career. Francis refuses because the painting that Ross wishes to buy is a fake, painted by himself. Ross, whom Francis loves platonically, commits suicide.

What’s Bred in the Bone is an old-fashioned morality tale, gracefully told, full of wit and humour. Davies is never heavy-handed with his characters. They are deftly portrayed, and for all of their flaws, are generally likeable, or at least understandable. The prose is smooth and erudite. Discussions of art, religion and astrology are incorporated seamlessly, along with quotes from Browning and Ben Jonson, which form a kind of gloss on the story. There are many splendid lines.

She was worse than a blabber; she was a hinter. The British have some odd talents, and writing obituaries is one of them. If the testicles needed some stern talking-to from time to time, even more so did the penis. The pianist had been the great Teresa Carreno, a famous matador of the instrument, imprisoned forever on a perforated roll of paper. His breath suggested that he was dying from within, and had completed about two-thirds of the job. Few of these horses were of the noble breed with arching neck and flashing eye; most were miserable screws, rackers, the broken-winded, the spavined, often far gone with the botts, or with nostrils dribbling from the glanders.

The Author

Roberston Davies was one of those protean figures who seemed larger than life. He looked like a character in one of his novels. He acted at the Old Vic, and helped launch the Stratford Festival in Canada. He was a newpaper editor and publisher, then taught literature at the U of T, where he was Master of Massey College. He wrote plays, and humorous essays under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks, and a stack of fine novels.

The Salterton Trilogy
Tempest-Tost
Leaven of Malice
A Mixture of Frailties

The Deptford Trilogy
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders

The Cornish Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
What's Bred in the Bone
The Lyre of Orpheus

The Toronto Trilogy (unfinished)
Murther & Walking Spirits
The Cunning Man

When Davies died in 1995, John Irving wrote a piece in Maclean’s that began by calling him the greatest comic novelist since Dickens.

Shelf Monkey

Have you ever tossed aside a book out of disgust for its inept writing? Have you ever wondered how such drivel gets published in the first place? And what about those rumours of bestseller lists being manipulated by bookstore chains to move vast quantities of trash?

Imagine how a booklover who is the teeniest bit unhinged might react. A booklover who, like a character named Aubrey in the novel, organizes his volumes by font:

My basement is mostly Cheltenham and variations. The kitchen is currently Arial and Bembo, the guest bedroom Bodoni.

Such is the premise for Corey Redekop's literary thriller about a group of bibliomaniacs who call themselves "shelf monkeys." Their gatherings have developed into a certain cult-like ritual that by the end of the novel gets way out of hand.

The book is replete with humour, profanity, and literary references. Identifying those references is one of the novel's main attractions. How many of the books recommended by the shelf monkeys have you read? Cryptonomicon? This All Happened? The Bear Went Over the Mountain? (Yes! Yes! Yes!)

There's also lots of literary name-dropping. Do you know who Winston Smith is? Chili Palmer? Lady Fuschia Groan? Valentine Michael Smith? Have you read China Mieville? Tibor Fischer?

When Aubrey appears at a costume event carrying a picture frame, is he referring to a book by Oscar Wilde or James Joyce? What is the reference when he says, "The first rule of Shelf Monkey Club? You do not talk about Shelf Monkey Club." Or when another character, petting a dog named Margarita, says to Aubrey, "So you're the Master I take it?"

The reason the shelf monkeys are so unstable? Most of them work in a big-box bookstore where they are forced to push dreadful books -- a situation that reminded me of Orwell's wonderful essay, "Bookshop Memories," in which he states that working in a bookstore destroyed his love of books.

There are some very fine lines in the book, some great laughs and invigorating rants.

...libraries, brothels of literature, old hags showing their stretch marks and cigarette burns, promising you a good time, sailor, I've got some tricks left, don't let the appearance fool you, just because some yahoo scribbled in my margins doesn't mean I can't pretend it's the first time with you, baby, just don't treat me too rough, or there'll be trouble, I've got friends...

There were a few places where I thought the book missed its mark, but overall Redekop's strong sure voice carries the day. He's certainly lined up some very big guns in his corner: Paul Quarrington on the back cover, and Miriam Toews in the acknowledgements.

Finally, a word about the physical object itself. The author has been well-served by his publisher, ECW. The book design is clean and crisp, while the cover is very bold indeed. Nary a word on the front, just a simple two-colour icon. A photo doesn't do it justice. The cover stock is thick and glossy with flaps, and feels good in the hands. I found myself repeatedly closing the book to admire it.

Riding the Iron Rooster

By Train Through China

Paul Theroux loves trains. His first great success was The Great Railway Bazaar, which described a journey by train from London to Japan, returning via the Trans-Siberian railway. Riding the Iron Rooster takes place in the mid-1980s, more than 10 years later, and describes a year spent in China travelling by train.

The book begins with a charming epigraph: "A peasant must stand a long time on a hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in." But the charm is superficial. China is an ancient, hungry, overpopulated country. In some places people are still living in caves. Theroux explains:

The Chinese had moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy. If there were enough of you it was really very easy to dig up a whole continent and plant cabbages. They had built a wall that was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Whole provinces had been turned into vegetable gardens, and a hill wasn't a hill--it was a way of growing rice vertically.

Theroux, able to converse in Chinese, crisscrosses the country by rail and examines everything with a microscopic eye. He reports on the Chinese penchant for spitting, the use of cormorants for fishing, an erotic novel that has been banned for five centuries. "The Chinese laugh," he tells us, "is seldom a response to something funny." A sign in a train reads: "Guests must not perform urination in sink basin." The death penalty consists of "a bullet in the back of the neck."

The food is an adventure in itself: sheep vein, snake soup, yak slices, cow tendon, caterpillar fungus, chicken foot stew, rotten eggs wrapped in seaweed, grilled bear's paw, stewed moose nose, stir-fried camel's foot, monkey-leg mushrooms, pig's trotters in gelatin.

He is particularly interested in Mao's legacy. What he discovers is that the Great Helmsman is in a kind of disgrace. The museum in his home town is closed. The Cultural Revolution is widely admitted to have been a mistake.

The book concludes on a positive note with a visit to Tibet. "Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave." Part of this is due Tibet being "a place for which China had no solution."

Theroux is an impeccable writer -- 480 pages and not a word out of place -- and he always has something interesting to say: a pithy observation, a telling description, an historical aside.

It should be added, however, that the book is more than 20 years old, and its portrait of China may be seriously out-of-date. It is also worth noting another Chinese proverb (one that Theroux himself is fond of quoting):

"We can always fool a foreigner."