Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Novel of Toronto as it modenized past it English roots and began to be the highly diverse city it is today. "Cunning Man" was a physican. (NOTE: Check on the online reviews; different take than MGA's, but I stand by my key memory of Toronto in transition.)" ( )

The entire story is framed as a newspaper interview that causes the elderly narrator, Dr. Jon Hullah, to remember his life through anecdotes and philosophical discussion much of it told in a gossipy tone. He delved into many topics: church, war, sex, family, medicine, even a joke told to him by an acquaintance that he recognized as a retelling of a Rabelais story. He lost my interest in a few spots, but was otherwise fascinating. This is a terrific accomplishment for Davies that came to be his unplanned last hurrah. ( )

We're in classic Robertson Davies country here, middle-class Toronto between the 1920s and the 1980s, with a cast of actors, musicians, artists, journalists and High Anglican priests and a mock-Trollope plot involving an Archdeacon at war with a parish that has been overdoing the bells-and-smells. In the middle of it all is our narrator Jonathan Hullah, a physician who believes — as I suspect most physicians do — that he has far better insight than his colleagues into his patients' problems. He attributes this superior ability partly to his reading of The anatomy of melancholy and partly to a childhood encounter with a Native-American healer and some snakes.

As we would expect, there's a strong whiff of Faustian bargains and black magic hanging around in the background, whilst the foreground story is full of people who start out with great promise and ambitious plans and end up in Canadian mediocrity, carving statues of the Queen Mother out of Ontario Creamery Butter. Hullah, of course, learns the limitations of his medical cunning. I don't think Davies can have been very happy when he wrote this, but there's a lot of fine sardonic humour here for the reader to enjoy, all the same. ( )

I am disappointed with Davies's last novel, The Cunning Man" from 1994 and the second novel of his unfinished "Toronto Trilogy". His second trilogy, from the early 1970's, the "Deptford Trilogy", with "Fifth Business", "The Manticore" and "World of Wonders" comprises three near-masterpieces and whopping good reads which should be on anyone's list. I was hoping for more here. Instead we have a novel of minimal general interest about older people, reminding this reader of Joseph Heller's followup to "Catch-22" the unlamented but undervalued "Something Happened", again about older people and showing diminished writing mastery. I did rather enjoy some time ago "Murther and Walking Spirits", Davies's first novel of the Toronto Trilogy.

Readers who might find this novel of interest are not old people, of whom I am one, but rather Canadians, especially those from Ontario, where the action takes place, and perhaps also readers of about 22 years who begin to be curious about the way life may look to an intelligent and observant (and frank) guy of about thrice that age, namely the physician of fairly unconventional methods who is the first-person main character.

Do read the Deptford trilogy. ( )

A very thoughtful reflection on what it means to be a healer. ( )