Beasts in the Jungle

THE MANTICORE by ROBERTSON DAVIES 310 pages. Viking. $7.95.

One of the best novels of a couple of years ago was Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, an investigation of the psychological and metaphysical tangle surrounding the life of a Canadian schoolmaster. Now comes The Manticore, a working out of one of the dark patterns visible in the earlier book.

It is a satellite, dependent on Fifth Business for its orbit. Yet it is a good novel for all that--subtle, solid and funny. David Staunton, the main figure, is a successful Canadian criminal lawyer. The court in which he finds himself struggling at mid-career is not the legal kind, however, and he is not defense attorney but defendant. Staunton is a skilled professional, a rationalist, a cynic and a celibate whose pose in personal matters is to remain aloof. In reality, he lives in an increasingly overgrown clearing surrounded by an unexplored psychological jungle, whose advance he slows by drinking a bottle of whisky a day. One of the beasts lurking here is his beloathed father, a rich bully whose obnoxious character was seen in Fifth Business, and when Father dies mysteriously, Staunton flees from Toronto to the office of a psychiatrist in Zurich.

The doctor is both a Jungian and a woman, and Staunton finds the second fact more alarming than the first. Rightly so; the females in Davies' novels are some of the most fearsome in literature. But Jungians, with their emphasis on myth, are well equipped to deal with beasts in jungles, and soon Staunton has identified a number of monsters, including the manticore--a creature with the head of a man, the body of a lion and the tail of a dragon. It is himself, the barbed and beastly rationalist. The colloquies between patient and healer are of a high order; now and then they veer unexpectedly into a mad kind of comedy, as when he tells of the attempt of his socially ambitious stepmother and an inept dentist friend to mold a plastic death mask from his father's corpse, with the result that the old man goes to his grave lacking eyebrows.

One danger in a novel of psychological explication is that when the jungle has been explored, it may be seen to be merely an ordinary nature preserve, down whose graveled paths the convalescent hero ambles in his bathrobe. Davies wisely breaks off before the analysis is finished. He also involves Staunton, a bit inconclusively, with some characters from Fifth Business. Since the author is an impeccable crafts man, the unraveled endings may be a cheerful sign that indeed a novel cycle is in progress.

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