Word: hullah
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...Cunning Man is the Case Book of the cunning man himself, Dr. Jonathan Hullah, and thus allows itself all the quirks of a personal journal. Dr. Hullah's account, folding over itself in time again and again, is ostensibly a set of notes intended to result in a great book, "an anatomy of fiction" the doctor will write: a study of the great books and the diseases within them. But the journal is much more interesting than the study could ever be, we suspect, and the result turns out to be, more or less, the good doctor's autobiography...
...Jonathan Hullah is from Sioux Lookout which, he tells us, lies "nearly 2000 miles northwest of Toronto." Although this sounds to an American like code for the North Pole, the narrative stays in the township long enough to give the young Hullah a youthful bout with scarlet fever (childhood disease is a favorite repeated trope of Davies), the friendship of an Indian healer and wise woman named Mrs. Smoke (who saves him with neither scalpel nor the Merck Manual) and a lifelong interest in medicine, especially non-traditional medicine...
Which is exactly what The Cunning Man is: a leisurely look back at the formation of an intriguing character and unusual doctor. ("My nose," he asserts, "is one of my principal diagnostic instruments.") "We old men are garrulous," Hullah says in passing, and he seems in no greater hurry to end his life story than he does to stop living. He recounts his pilgrimage from a rural Canadian village through school and World War II service in the medical corps with cool good humor and plenty of diverting asides ("What has nature produced more totally ravishing than a beautiful, witty...
...Hullah fell in love but once, at age 24, and then lost her, at least formally, when the woman married one of his closest school friends. But they maintained an intermittent affair, and Hullah now believes that her grown son may also be his. What, he wonders, should he do with this suspicion? "My son. Do I look on him with dimmed eyes, yearning to embrace him and claim him as my own? No, I don't. Things are very well as they...
This cool, ironic tone may puzzle readers who have grown accustomed to the exhibitionist screeches and gibberings of contemporary fictional narrators. But Davies has never minded appearing old-fashioned in the absence of a preferable alternative. At one point Hullah describes a typical novel by John Galsworthy, "full of controlled social consciousness, detailed but not probing investigation of character, and unimpeachable sanity, justice and compassion." A better self-review would be hard to imagine...