Novel: The Lyre of Orpheus

Overview
The Lyre of Orpheus closes Robertson Davies's Cornish Trilogy with a playful, erudite meditation on art, authorship and the ways myth shapes creative life. Centered on the recovery, completion and staging of an unfinished opera, the novel moves between backstage farce and metaphysical reflection, balancing comic mishap with philosophical inquiry. Davies uses the Orpheus myth as a leitmotif to examine the obligations and follies of those who make, alter and present art.

Plot
An unfinished operatic score left by a deceased composer becomes the catalyst for events that draw together a circle of musicians, writers, impresarios and patrons. The project to finish and mount the work sets off a chain of practical and personal complications: disputes over fidelity to the original, the clash of temperaments in rehearsals, and a string of unforeseen romantic and comic entanglements. As preparations proceed, the production itself becomes a battleground for questions about creative control, authenticity and the rights of the dead author versus the imaginative liberties of successors.

Themes
Davies frames artistic creation in the shadow of myth, treating Orpheus as both metaphor and structural engine. The novel probes whether art redeems or betrays its source, whether completion can honour an original spirit or merely impose a new narrative. Fate and free will recur throughout, not as abstract doctrines but as lived tensions revealed in rehearsal rooms, editorial decisions and the small accidents that alter lives. Comedy and seriousness coexist: the book is alert to the absurd logistics of cultural production while insistently curious about larger metaphysical questions.

Characters and Voices
Rather than a single protagonist, the narrative unfolds through a constellation of figures whose competing ambitions and loyalties animate the story. Davies gives equal attention to the practical people who realize a production , directors, singers, stagehands , and to the patrons and critics who confer meaning on public art. Dialogue, anecdote and reflective narration blend to reveal how personal histories, professional reputations and aesthetic doctrines shape choices about restoration and reinvention. The chorus of voices allows Davies to satirize artistic pretension while remaining sympathetically attuned to the risks and compulsions of creatives.

Style and Structure
Davies combines elegant literary wit with a novelist's ear for theatrical detail. Scenes pivot between rehearsal-room minutiae and broader intellectual conversations, often pausing for digressions on music, myth and biography that illuminate characters' motives. The pace is buoyant; comic set pieces alternate with quieter meditations on mortality and legacy. Structural echoes of mythic narrative , descent and attempted return, loss and recovery , give the book a mythic resonance even as it dwells in everyday absurdities.

Reception and Resonance
The Lyre of Orpheus is frequently praised for its blend of scholarly intelligence and comic vitality. It rewards readers who enjoy novels that think about the arts from the inside: the pleasures of performance, the compromises of collaboration, and the ethical puzzles of finishing another's work. More than a satire of artistic life, the novel is a compassionate inquiry into how stories and music persist, mutate and bind people together, asking whether the act of completing a piece of art can be an act of homage, theft or both.