Murther and Walking Spirits (Toronto Trilogy, #1)

“We live and learn, yes. But we die and learn, too, it appears.”

Reread of what I think is Davies's weakest novel, with an interesting but awkwardly worked out premise. The idea of a recently deceased man viewing a private “film festival” of his ancestors' lives is ingenious, but hard to put into practice: describing films is the deadliest thing imaginable, and aside from a few glimpses Davies wisely doesn't try, mostly reverting to the narrative techniques that he is accustomed to using. In effect his first-person narrator becomes a third-person narrator of the scenes he is beholding, and the switching back and forth can be jarring.

I also don't feel like we get enough of Gil, the dead man - he comes to know himself through this vision of his forebears, or so he says, but who is he? Again, we get some glimpses, but then we're swept away into someone else's life, and the result just doesn't entirely satisfy.

Along the way there were some wonderful nuggets of wisdom, even if the whole didn't quite gel for me.

“Was I really such an unreflecting, uncomprehending jackass when I was alive that I supposed the sufferings and inadequacies of humanity came for the first time in my own experience? No; not wholly. But I had never applied what I knew as general truths to the people without whom I should never have experienced life; I had taken them for granted. As McWearie used to say, one's family is made up of supporting players in one's personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.”

In the end, the message is one of compassion and love, for the players with whom we share our little drama, but also for ourselves. And that's always worth an attempt at communication.