An insightful exploration of the making of a person in depths of their being. What's inherent and what's a function of life experience. ( )

Something unwholesome here. Just plain misanthropy?

Am I the only person who has trouble with the name Maimas? Not only is it Sam-I-Am spelt backwards, but every time I type it it comes out as Miasma. It's an interesting choice to mediate third-person omniscient viewpoint through an associate of the Recording Angel, but unfortunate when an author comes up with a distracting name that appears frequently through the course of the book.

I read this years ago, but was just thinking of it. (This says something about the reach of a novel, that it comes to mind in our own life circumstances.) Mr. Davies used his own family and the stories that filtered down to create a plausible personal history. What are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? ( )

Robertson Davies uses the word “chthonic” more than once in What’s Bred in the Bone and that’s a lot to pardon. However, I’m going to pardon it because in this novel from 1985 he employs the word “trumpery,” which word, it turns out, means “worthless nonsense” according to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition). Well worth knowing.

Davies is a story teller of great gifts whose abundant intelligence and knowledge fill his book with humor and interest throughout. Early on I was inclined, despite a lively first chapter, to nickname the book If Read It Will Bore as a grumbling reaction to his naming of the early female characters: Maria, Marie-Louise, Mary-Jacobine (Mary-Jim), Mary-Teresa (Mary-Tes), Mary-Benedetta (Mary-Ben) and, mother of mercy, Mother Mary-Basil. An unjust thought that proved.

The man that’s bred, Francis Cornish, is the son of extraordinarily self-absorbed parents who seldom can be bothered to slight their own pursuits so much as to allow their son sight of them. Even Christmas time does not fetch them his way. Love, to the child, seems a thing locked away. Francis’s guardian daimon, the Daimon Maimas (“I am no guardian angel”), worries little about parental absence, or locked love, or whether the boy will become broken-hearted by it. This is, among much else, what’s being bred in the child’s bones and then in the man’s. It will present its challenges.

Art is the vital commerce of the book at many levels, with attention paid to matters of authenticity and fakery, triviality and consequence, care and craft, fortune and fealty, mastery and modernism, Catholicism and Protestantism, pity and pitilessness, what is known and what should not be unknown yet is. Ultimately, the story takes us on a mostly retrospective viewing of the streams of exploration or exploitation presented by one man’s life and visits the tributaries of influence that entered into them. Francis Cornish is a man seemingly made to be often denied—in some instances singularly so. But he isn’t, after all is done. That’s the ingenuity of both author and character. No trumpery in that. ( )