SOURCE: "Life After Death," in Canadian Literature, No. 134, Autumn, 1992, pp. 153-54.

[Scheick is an American educator and critic. In the review below, he comments favorably on Murther & Walking Spirits.]

The narrator of Robertson Davies's new novel [Murther & Walking Spirits] discovers his wife and a subordinate en flagrant délit, and is fatally bludgeoned for his trouble. Instead of undergoing the proverbial review of his life, the narrator unexpectedly witnesses, as if watching a series of motion pictures, a review of the lives of his ancestors from the eighteenth century onward. In dying, ironically, he learns something profound about living, and he actually undergoes a change of self.

He learns the truth of Heraclitus's observation "that anything, if pursued beyond a reasonable point, turns into its opposite." Again and again, he beholds the continuous rise and fall and resurrection of human desire and achievement as generation after generation experiences...