The Salterton Trilogy by Robertson Davies

I really, really liked these novels. The trilogy was published in 1980, and set sometime earlier than that I think, so it’s dated –contemporary but, as somebody once described it, deals with the ‘universal now’. That’s such a great term to describe the continuing relevance of character and theme. The first tells the story of an amateur theatre group in the small Canadian town of Salterton who are putting on their annual performance. It’s the lightest of the three and focuses primarily on the characters and their relationships as they struggle to produce The Tempest. Some of these characters reappear in the other two novels. The second begins with the publication of an engagement notice pertaining to two of the characters, and then explores the ripples, including law suits and family feuds, that this causes. The main character in this book is the newspaper editor, an absolute delight of a character, who abhors the pomposity and wordiness of his colleagues and all the guff and politicking that goes on in small communities. The third begins with the death of one of the characters and the subsequent establishment of a trust to support a young artist and then follows her development, a break away from Salterton really and indeed from most of the characters we knew earlier. Robertson Davies writes that sort of social satire that I love so much, but with a generosity of spirit that you don’t find in some other harsher critics. There are some truly awful people in Salterton, and he doesn’t shy away from that, but there are also people who are a real-life mix of good and really quite bad whom he treats with compassion for the human condition. While his books approach the soap opera intensity of small town gossip and intrigue, he also talks about much bigger things, touching on the spirit and art and philosophy. What might sometimes tip over into didacticism is counterbalanced by wit and and an enjoyment of the outrageous (by the standards of the 1980s of course.) So while the trilogy is long – about 800 Penguin pages – it’s a page turner as well as being thoughtful and educated, and beautifully written to book.