Dempster's "miracles" is appearing in the face of a Madonna at the battlefield at Passchendaele) and then a respected teacher and scholar on the saints. All that is really the set-up the novel follows Ramsay through his entire life, first as an accidental war hero in World War I (one of Mrs. Writing all that out, I'm struck by the fragile complexity of Robertson Davies' Fifth Business. Meanwhile, the boy who actually threw the snowball, a rich kid actually called Boy, suppresses the act past remembrance. Dempster is a kind of saint, complete with three miracles. Paul grows up and leaves home to become a famous magician, while Ramsay becomes convinced that the near-mad Ms. Dunstan grows up feeling protective of her, and her son Paul, whom he teaches the rudiments of stage magic. She comes out of the labor in a state some might call "touched"-a kind of simplicity en route to madness that makes her the subject of the town's whispers. The snowball hits Mary Dempster, the pregnant wife of the small Ontario town's minister, and causes her to go into labor early. This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.Īs a young boy, Dunstan Ramsay carefully evades a snowball thrown by a rival.
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