The LRC 100 (Part Two)

To read the introduction and first fifty selections of this feature, published in our January/February 2006 issue, click here.

51. Fifth Business (1970) by Robertson Davies

Rich, wolfish, charming Boy Staunton throws a snowball with a stone in it at his pal Dunstan Ramsay on the streets of Deptford, a small Ontario town. Like the chaos theory butterfly whose wingbeat ultimately triggers tornadoes, so is this snowball, which hurtles on to fell a pregnant woman and cause madness and a premature birth that create saints, sinners, magicians and suicides. Fifth Business also created an international reputation for Davies, and ultimately led to comparisons with Thomas Mann and Charles Dickens and talk of a Nobel Prize for literature. But its most significant impact, and that of the other two volumes of the Deptford trilogy, was the realization that one could be struck by grotesqueries...