The Deptford Trilogy (3)

This story of Magnus Eisengrim, master illusionist, the most illustrious magician of his age, has been called “a spectacular, soaring work, an astounding tour de force unequaled in recent literature.” is the final volume in Robertson Davies’s celebrated Deptford Trilogy, which began with and

Hailed by the Book World as “a modern classic,” Robertson Davies’s acclaimed is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. —the second book in the series after —follows David Staunton, a man pleased with his success but haunted by his relationship with his larger-than-life father. As he seeks help through therapy, he encounters a wonderful cast of characters who help connect him to his past and the death of his father.

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man’s land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous.

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