What's bred in the bone - Robertson Davies (First American edition; The Cornish Trilogy #2)

This new Robertson Davies masterpiece, rich in character and action, sweeps its protagonist from small-town Ontario to great events on the world’s stage. A conflicted, dramatic youth, apprenticeship to a master painter, involvement in anti-Nazi intrigue, and an ironic, eccentric old age—these are some of the elements in an astonishing tale of artistic triumph and heroic deceit.

What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh, says the old proverb, and what was bred in Francis Cornish—born to a wealthy, patrician family in a small Ottawa Valley town—shaped a life that caused tremors in the international art world. To most Canadians, Francis was simply the eccentric artist son of the well-connected Cornishes, the one who had chosen not to be associated with its trusts and business enterprises. To the obituary writers, he was an expert and collector of international renown. To Colonel Copplestone, Francis was a promising player in the Great Game of secret intelligence work. And to his nephew, Arthur, and his disappointed biographer, Simon Darcourt, Francis was a mystery, a man involved in much more than met the eye.

In this intricately plotted, stylishly dramatic novel, Robertson Davies would have us accept that two supernatural beings—not rebel angels this time, but a recording angel and Francis’s daimon—draw back the curtain to expose the real contours of Francis Cornish’s life, his saturnine yet mercurial temperament, and the events and influences that pushed him not only to artistic achievement but to heroism. And it is a special kind of heroism. For Francis Cornish is a forger who understands the truth, an artist who becomes a spy, a rich man who both squanders and hoards his extraordinary inheritance.

At once ingenious and powerful, What’s Bred in the Bone holds the usual rich mixture of Davies’s delights. Soho prostitutes, secret agents, Bavarian countesses, and a small-town embalmer people its pages, as the action takes us from an Ontario attic with a dreadful secret to King Arthur’s Tintagel Castle and on to the bizarre Toronto apartment where Francis meets his end. As always, Davies tells the tale with lavish and equal portions of his inimitable wisdom and wit.