Ramsey grows up in a small, southwestern Ontario town called Deptford ( a fictionalisation of the worse-named Thamesville) at the start of the 20th century, where aged about 10 he and his friend/rival “Boy Staunton” accidentally hit a pregnant woman (Mrs Dempster) with a snowball which causes her to fall, give birth prematurely and then, forever, be insane. The title of Fifth Business is explained twice in the book – once in an epigraph and, again, in a conversation towards the end of the novel.ĭunstan Ramsey, the narrator and protagonist, is “fifth business”, a character trope associated (apparently) with opera: not the hero, not the heroine, not the confidante, not the villain, but the other person – any other person – needed to make the world around these four important figures function. Though, yes, this is a style of book (acclaimed novel by someone from my own demographic) that I tend to eschew these days, I thoroughly enjoyed Fifth Business and am semi-secretly looking forward to ploughing through the rest of this trilogy over the Summer as there is something far more comforting (to me) in an escapist text like this, rather than an escapist text like Tehanu, in this time of mass global pandemic. Finally, with this – the first part of a trilogy – I have dropped myself into the comforting squall of a middlebrow middle class white male novel, a novel all about white men with lots of money doing international travel, cheating on their wives, keeping secrets, writing books, making connections in high places and worrying about trite, meaningless, things.

Having been in Canada for almost eighteen months now, I’ve read quite a few Canadian books, however – I realised a few pages into Robertson Davies’ 1970 novel Fifth Business – none of them have been by middle class white men.

Fifth business book