Thu 23 Jul 2009
ROBERTSON DAVIES – High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories. Viking, US, hardcover, 1983; Penguin, softcover, many printings. First edition: Penguin Canada, 1982.
Robertson Davies was a writer of considerable talent, and every Christmas he used to tell a ghost story to the students at Massey College. These tales are gathered together in High Spirits, and they make for fun, if not very spooky, reading.
The tales in fact, are all mildly humorous and set very firmly in the context of Academia (hardly surprising, considering the audience). Thus we get stories of the spirit of a Grad Student, doomed to endlessly defend his thesis, the ghost of a forgotten University President, the souls of Canadian writers yearning to be re-born as American writers, and that sort of thing.
Former Academicians both past and present could probably relate to these, and I found them entertaining enough, but hardly the sort of thing to evoke shudders in the Season of the Witch.
July 23rd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Although in no way a detective story, Davies’ Murther and Walking Spirits does tell the story of a murder victim solving his own murder, and themes of crime and espionage appear in some of his other works. World of Wonders, part of his first sequence of novels, features as its main character a Houdini like escape artist. He is a wonderful writer who can be both very funny and very moving when he wants.
High Spirits is a fine collection of ghost stories more in the vein of The Canterville Ghost or The Ghost Goes West than M.R. James or Algernon Blackwood.
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
My own favorites are TEMPEST TOST and LEAVEN OF MALICE.