Word: hullah
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...Davies doesn't take long to whisk us away to Toronto, where at Colborne College we are introduced to the young Brocky Gilmartin, who will become a professor of literature as the narrative unfolds, and Charlie Iredale, future Anglican priest. Hullah's two friends take opposite positions within the book: Brocky is clever and laughing, Charlie plodding and serious. We follow their progress into adulthood, and Dr. Hullah's exploits in war, in love, in theater...
...Cunning Man does not, however, purport to be Hullah's chronological autobiography, and does not move as a blow-by-blow account from Sioux Lookout to the moment Hullah takes up pen and begins to write...
...relate to the events of the present. The impetus of his memory--and memory does comprise the bulk of the novel--is a series of articles by the journalist Esme Barron (later Esme Gilmartin--she marries Conor, Brocky's son) about old Toronto and for which she is interviewing Hullah. This narrative strand, the present, which brings about the memory aspect of the novel, continues on its own for years. Brocky, Charlie, and Hullah are middle-aged...
...this time Dr. Hullah has developed quite a bit of his own philosophy, which will be suspiciously familiar to devotees of Mr. Davies. Doctors are kinds of priests and priests are kinds of doctors. Priests are kinds of poets as well, and Dr. Hullah begins to think about writing his great "Anatomy of Fiction." What else could we expect? Esme Barron and Conor Gilmartin, as well as Hugh McWearie, reappear from Davies' last novel, Murther and Walking Spirits; old Dunstan Ramsey steps out of The Deptford Trilogy for rather a lengthy visit, joined as well by his friend Boy Stanton...
...universe behind the books, that Ramsey is a person who distilled his own life into a book, rather than a mere puppet animated only for literature. No living person writing an autobiography tells all he or she knows, and Davies is not telling us all he knows. Neither is Hullah. Ramsey is alive--or, at least, there is still much more to his life than we know, and it exists without there being a book about it. His cameo appearance reminds us that there are things we don't know about him, and suggests that they exist. In The Cunning...