Fifth Business

When I was in college, my husband and I were big fans of a non-defunct band called Moxy Fruvous. They have a song called "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors." Since I was an English major at the time, it seemed like a cute song for my then-boyfriend to adopt as "my song," and I didn't refute it much, although I didn't know the work of most of the authors mentioned in the original version. (There was an alternate live version.)

For my birthday one year, my husband got me a book from one of each of the authors mentioned in the original version of the song, and wrapped the books with theme-appropriate wrapping paper. His best friend helped him scour the used bookstores in Ann Arbor for weeks, reportedly, and I thought the results was simply adorable and romantic and spoke of great loving effort on his part.

Although it was a totally cool gift, it was a bit illogical for me at the time. I had a ton of reading for my classes, and I had no time to read them. Once I did try to read some, I had mixed success with them. I couldn't get into William S. Burroughs and Pierre Burton, I didn't think much of poet bell hooks, and I'd already read the Gabriel Garcia Marquez book he'd given me. Although I own three of her books, I've never read anything from Doris Lessing (I think donnagirl is ashamed of that in a friend). I couldn't get into the movie The English Patient, so I've been loathe to try to book, although history has taught me repeatedly that the book is so much better.

On the other hand, I enjoyed reading The Godfather, the original book, and learned to love baseball and its emotion by reading W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, much better than the movie it was based on. I've since gone on to read several other Kinsella books and greatly enjoyed them. And Margaret Atwood was already a friend of mine by this time (The Handmaid's Tale was on my AP World Lit summer reading list, and I searched out more of her books the summer before college started).

Today, I finished the last of the authors - Robertson Davies. Joe bought me a book of his called The Fifth Business. It began slow, I was willing to give up on it around page 35, I was willing to finish it by page 50, and I was hooked by 100 or so. It's the first in a trilogy, and even when I was hooked, I didn't think I'd want to continue the series, especially since reviews of it say it stands alone just fine, but I've finished the book now, and I want to find the other ones. The basic idea of this one: a cripple from World War 1 is strapped with absurd responsibilities and ultimitely gets involved in a magic show of an unusual kind. Some quotes that made me think:

• "This is one of the cruelties of the theater of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries."


• "I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear."


• "If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations."


• "'My own idea is that when He comes again it will be to continue his ministry as an old man. I am an old man and my life has been spent as a soldier of Christ, and I tell you that the older I grow the less Christ's teaching says to me. I am sometimes very conscious that I am following the path of a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw and felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Everybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man? All Christ's teaching is put forward with the dogmatism, the certainty, and the strength of youth: I need something that takes account of the accretion of experience, the sense of paradox, and the ambiguity that comes with years! I think after forty we sould recognize Christ polityly but turn for our comfort and guidance to God the Father, who knows the good and evil of life, and to the Holy Ghost, who possesses wisdom beyond that of the incarnated Christ.'"


• "'Who are you? Where do you fit into poetry and myth? Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business. You don't know what that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company... you must have a prima donna - always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villian or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor. So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody's death if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage a plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices. Are you Fifth Business? You had better find out.'"

Too bad my book club voted on a series of "beach reads" this month and I have to read this one right now...