{"id":663,"date":"2002-03-13T17:16:06","date_gmt":"2002-03-13T17:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/?p=663"},"modified":"2016-10-04T17:20:35","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T17:20:35","slug":"murther-and-walking-spirits-by-robertson-davies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/book-review\/fantasy\/murther-and-walking-spirits-by-robertson-davies\/","title":{"rendered":"Murther and Walking Spirits, by Robertson Davies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"murther-walking-spirits-by-robertson-davies\"<\/a>Genre: Fantasy<\/strong>
\n Publisher: Viking<\/strong>
\n Published: 1991<\/strong>
\n Reviewer Rating: \"threestars\"<\/strong>
\n Book Review by Paul S. Jenkins<\/strong><\/p>\n

Have you read this book?
\nWhy not rate it! \"1\"2\"3\"4\"5
<\/span><\/span>Loading...<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a frame story; journalist Connor Gilmartin, having been unceremoniously murdered by his wife’s lover, sits incorporeal next to his murderer at the Toronto Film Festival, watching from the afterlife as a filmic representation of the lives of his forebears is presented to him. The drama-documentary is in Davies’ typical style, with his broad sweep across generations — more so than usual as he can invent dramatic points of view without restriction.<\/p>\n

The story of Gil’s ancestors is one of struggle and hardship — a history of Canadian settlers. But what do we learn from this? We see what it’s like for the prior generations, but there’s little sense of an overall plot. It’s a kind of fictional multi-memoir. Davies’ writing style is a joy to indulge in, but the detachment that the ‘frame device’ inevitably brings gives the memoir a dispassionate slant — reinforced by the narrator’s continual references to his own spiritual state.<\/p>\n

It’s a strange book — involving and superbly written, but at the end curiously unsatisfying — as if it was leading up to something that never quite occurs. It lacks the detailed characterization and sheer power of some of Davies’ other work — the Cornish trilogy, for example. What we actually get in Murther is a resolution of sorts, but not of the ‘history’. The narrator seeks a kind of peace; the reader waits for a climax to the book, and ends up with something else.<\/p>\n

Click here to buy Murther and Walking Spirits, by Robertson Davies on Amazon<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Genre: Fantasy Publisher: Viking Published: 1991 Reviewer Rating: Book Review by Paul S. Jenkins Have you read this book? This is a frame story; journalist Connor Gilmartin, having been unceremoniously murdered by his wife’s lover, sits incorporeal next to his murderer at the Toronto Film Festival, watching from the afterlife …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[74,168,192,190,191],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfreader.com\/r\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}