While Ramsay takes pity on Paul and often keeps him company, Staunton refuses to take responsibility for throwing the snowball. Dempster's behavior grows progressively more erratic until she is ostracized from polite society after being found having sex with a homeless tramp in a gravel pit, leading Paul Dempster to become an outcast in the village. Apparently afflicted with severe mental trauma by the incident, Mrs. Hoping to prove that he has lived a worthwhile and fulfilling life, Ramsay pens an indignant letter to the school's headmaster relating the story of his life, beginning with a childhood memory of an incident that occurred in his hometown of Deptford, Ontario in December 1908.ĭuring a quarrel with a ten-year-old Ramsay (then known as "Dunstable Ramsay"), Ramsay’s wealthy friend Percy Boyd Staunton angrily hurls a snowball at him, but accidentally hits his heavily pregnant neighbor Mary Dempster, causing her to prematurely give birth to a sickly child called "Paul". Plot summary ĭunstan Ramsay, an aging history teacher at Colborne College, becomes enraged by the patronizing tone of a newspaper article announcing his recent retirement, which appears to portray him as an unremarkable old man with no notable accomplishments to his name. It was the novel that brought Davies to international attention.
Fifth Business (1970) is a novel by Canadian writer Robertson Davies.įirst published by Macmillan of Canada in 1970, it is the first installment of Davies' best-known work, the Deptford Trilogy, and explores the life of the narrator, Dunstan Ramsay.
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