Davies is one of my favorite authors, to whom I return again and again, always finding something new to think about, always enjoying his keen perceptions about humanity.
This is the second book in his (unfinished)Toronto Trilogy, but it reads like a standalone. The narrator is a physician with an uncanny gift for diagnosis and an unusual methodology. Humor, high jinks, a possible saint, a possible murder in a very high Anglican church and all the convoluted relationships among a certain set of Toronto's intellectual/artistic crowd are grist for Davies' mill--which grinds exceeding small, indeed.
An utterly delightful re-re-read!
NOTE: Regarding the caduceus --the physician's symbol of two serpents twined around a staff--Davies (through his characters) has this to say:
". . . the warring serpents of Hermes--Knowledge and Wisdom, balanced in an eternal tension."
"Knowledge being science and all the accumulated lore you have pumped into you at medical school; science which keeps changing and shifting all through your lifetime, like a snake shedding its old skin--"
"And Wisdom, with which you have to apply and temper the whole business, and fit it to the patient who sits before you, so that it too has a serpentine sinuosity and of course the wisdom which snakes are--quite mistakenly--supposed to possess."
I've been fortunate to have known a few medical providers who seemed to try for that balance.
3 comments:
This good Canadian has never read that good Canadian.
I don't think I've read his work...another good author to hunt down. Those who are considered healers are a very interesting set of human beings.
My favourite is his Deptford Trilogy, the first of his works I read, 'way back in grad school. Should re-read all the books, though -- what in my memory is my best liked may not be so in my current mind.
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