Novel: Fifth Business

Overview
Dunstan Ramsay, a schoolteacher from a small Ontario village, tells his life story as a long confessional memoir. The narrative begins with a seemingly trivial childhood episode during a Christmas pageant and traces the far-reaching consequences of that moment for several lives. The title captures a theatrical idea: the indispensable, often overlooked role that makes drama possible without ever taking center stage.

Plot summary
A snowball thrown during a schoolyard skirmish strikes Mary Dempster, a gentle, eccentric woman whose ensuing mental collapse and mysterious behavior mark her as both an object of pity and a kind of local saint. That incident links three boys, Dunstan, the ambitious and ruthless Boy Staunton, and the fragile infant Paul Dempster, into a tangled web of responsibility, resentment and fate. As they grow, Boy Staunton pursues wealth and public success while Dunstan becomes a teacher and an authority on hagiography, preoccupied with saints and the spiritual dimensions of ordinary lives.
Dunstan's narrative follows decades of subtle, decisive interventions: his silent protection of Mary Dempster, his indirect role in Paul's disappearance and reinvention, and his uneasy friendship with Boy Staunton. Years later Paul resurfaces as a celebrated stage magician, while Boy Staunton's surface triumphs mask moral emptiness and hidden crimes. Dunstan's voice moves between candid self-examination and wry observation as he uncovers secrets, acknowledges culpability, and tries to name the pattern that has governed their destinies.

Main characters
Dunstan Ramsay is both protagonist and analyst, a man whose devotion to scholarship and the lives of saints becomes a way of understanding his own moral perplexities. Mary Dempster occupies a paradoxical place as wife, outcast and symbol: her apparent madness and enigmatic goodness drive Dunstan's lifelong fascination with sanctity. Boy Staunton embodies social ambition and moral callousness, while Paul Dempster's metamorphosis into a master illusionist dramatizes themes of identity, reinvention and the uses of art.
Other figures, teachers, priests, performers, populate a community in which private acts ripple outward. Relationships are arranged less as romantic arcs than as moral obduracies and compensations, with each character contributing to a network of blame, protection and narrative rescue.

Themes and motifs
Guilt, responsibility and the nature of sainthood form the novel's moral core. Dunstan treats sanctity not as miraculous purity but as an elusive, often comic role that involves enduring ordinary suffering and paying attention to others. Myth and theatricality underlie characters' attempts to make meaning: Jungian archetypes, hagiography and dramatist language recur as tools for interpreting private history. The idea of the "fifth business", the indispensable supporting player who makes the drama coherent, becomes a metaphor for those who shape events without receiving credit.
Psychology and the search for narrative truth are constant; memory is both instrument and obstacle. The novel probes how stories preserve and distort motives, how reputation is constructed, and how redemption may arrive through art, confession or quiet fidelity.

Structure and style
The first-person, retrospective voice mixes scholarly allusion, dry humor and plain confession. Sentences range from plain historical reporting to reflective digression, and the tone shifts between ironic distance and moral earnestness. Davies interlaces drama, folklore and psychological insight, allowing mythic patterns to illuminate everyday incidents while refusing simplistic moral judgments.
The book's methodical recall and analytic pauses invite readers to weigh evidence alongside the narrator, turning a provincial life into a study of narrative responsibility.

Legacy and interpretation
As the first volume of the Deptford Trilogy, the novel established Davies's reputation for blending comedy, moral seriousness and erudition. It remains a widely read exploration of how ordinary actions resonate through a lifetime and how narrative itself becomes a form of ethics. The novel's lasting power comes from its empathy for flawed characters and its insistence that the unnoticed roles people play can be as decisive as heroic ones.