Robertson Davies Critical Essay | Robertson Davies

Critical Review by Phil Baker

SOURCE: "A Doctor of Souls," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4801, April 7, 1995, p. 25.

[In the following review, Baker comments favorably on The Cunning Man.]

It is the morning of Good Friday, and the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified is in progress in Toronto, at St Aidan's, a church so High as to be controversial, with "a whiff of gunpowder amid the incense". Father Ninian Hobbes has just taken the Communion wafer into his mouth, when he suddenly drops to the ground. For a second, it looks like genuflection, but it is a heart-attack. Father Hobbes, believed by many to be nothing less than a modern-day saint, is dead.

Whodunit enthusiasts should already be suspecting a case of Death by Wafer, but Robertson Davies calmly shifts the emphasis away from the end of Father Hobbes to the life of the Cunning Man, Dr Jonathan Hullah, who is telling...
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