The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies

First published: 1981

Type of work: Psychological romance

Time of work: The early 1980’s

Locale: Toronto

Principal Characters:

• Maria Magdalena Theotoky, a beautiful graduate student of gypsy background enamored of her mentor
• The Reverend Simon Darcourt, an Anglican priest and classics professor at a major Canadian university
• Clement Hollier, Maria’s dissertation director, a historian of beliefs researching into filth therapy
• John Parlabane, a dangerously individualistic philosopher, a fallen monk, and a would-be novelist
• Urquhart McVarish, a professor of Renaissance history, an academic rival to Hollier, and a closet fetishist
• Arthur Cornish, a banker and an administrator of his uncle’s bequest of art, books, and manuscripts

The Novel

The academic year begins with special challenges for some of the faculty at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost (which is affectionately called “Spook”), a branch of a major university. The Reverend Simon Darcourt, along with Professors Clement Hollier and Urquhart McVarish, is charged with overseeing the enormously complicated bequest of Francis Cornish, an important art collector. The interests of various institutions, university factions, and research scholars make this task especially sensitive. Arthur Cornish, Francis Cornish’s nephew, heir, and executor, must oversee these proceedings.

Included in Francis’ collection is a cache of manuscripts by Francois Rabelais—a “find” that is bound to make the careers of those entrusted with it. Hollier, who once glanced at these materials, is sure that they will further his own studies as well as launch the career of his prize student, Maria Theotoky. He has promised her that he has something special for her dissertation studies, and he is anxious to come through on his promise. The Rabelais packet is missing, however, and the only hint is a note that Darcourt finds among Francis’ papers indicating that the manuscripts had been loaned to McVarish. Darcourt confronts McVarish with the memorandum, but the history professor disclaims any knowledge of the matter. Darcourt is troubled; Hollier is enraged; Maria is perplexed.

In fact, she has been perplexed with Hollier’s behavior since his return from the summer break. In an ecstasy of mutual admiration and excitement over shared pursuits, they had made love. Maria senses that Hollier is allowing the relationship to cool, and she is not sure of his feelings or just how aggressive she wants to be in rekindling his passion. She believes that she is in love with him, has some confidence in her attractiveness, yet she cannot determine exactly what is needed to test and shape their relationship properly. Soon enough, trouble appears.

The trouble is John Parlabane, a meddlesome, abrasive, down-and-out child of “Spook,” who decides to exploit his old friendship with Hollier and, to a lesser extent, Darcourt. Parlabane tries the patience of everyone, especially Maria. He usurps her work space in Hollier’s offices for his temporary home, pokes through her papers, and attempts to bully her with his mixture of brilliant erudition and coarse behavior. Unexpectedly, and in spite of herself, Maria is helped by Parlabane’s noisy and nosy probing into her personal life, her professional concerns, and her motives. Too much the individualist for his own good, he nevertheless leads Maria to a better and stronger sense of herself. She eventually includes him in her list of rebel angels—Darcourt and Hollier are the others—who bring wisdom to man, though perhaps without God’s blessing.

Hollier, in passionate pursuit of his studies, has Maria bring him to her home, where he wins the confidence of Maria’s gypsy mother. Madame Laoutaro (she has resumed her maiden name) reveals to Hollier the secret of the bomari, an ancient restoration procedure for old violins involving the use of horse dung. This meeting with Maria’s family not only feeds Hollier’s researches into folk beliefs but also impresses upon him the active power of belief in itself. Madame Laoutaro, seeing in Hollier a good match for Maria, recommends jealousy as the means to move the relationship forward.

Darcourt, selected as the “other man,” is invited by Maria to attend a Christmas festivity at which Hollier will also be present. Darcourt, who has himself begun to fall in love with Maria (who is enrolled in his New Testament Greek class), is flattered by the invitation. Madame Laoutaro whips up an extravagant ceremonial feast at which everyone gets slightly tipsy. Darcourt, however, seems to be more encouraged than Hollier.

The Christmas dinner, at which Maria plays the role of gypsy serving girl, helps her come to terms with the battle between “crown” and “root”—a battle that Parlabane’s harassment had brought to her consciousness. Parlabane himself is now thoroughly engrossed in finding some way to bring his great philosophical novel to an appreciative public. Those who have been privileged to offer opinions, Maria among them, find it a self-justifying, muddled mess.

Complications multiply throughout the spring term, finally culminating in unexpected violence. Parlabane kills McVarish, revealing in a long letter that he had for some time been making some of the money he needed to pay off blackmail demands by catering to McVarish’s perverse fetishes. With this act, he frees the Rabelais manuscripts that McVarish had indeed been hiding, thus repaying Maria and Hollier for all of their past favors. Yet these revelations, emerging after his own suicide, are part of Parlabane’s scheme to ensure the publication and success of his novel. As scandal ruined his career as a scholar, so it would bring him a kind of posthumous triumph. The university is thrown into turmoil, freeing energies beneficial to its high and mighty purposes.

Darcourt will not let Hollier have the manuscript: at least not yet. Since this item was not specifically left to any institution, it passes on to Arthur Cornish, who can determine its future. Coincidentally, Arthur has emerged as the successful suitor for Maria, though there remains an appropriate measure of love for Hollier, Darcourt, and the deceased Parlabane—the rebel angels. Arthur offers her a grand and intimate friendship, along with passion and devotion, an offer that no one else can match. The novel concludes with their marriage, presided over by Darcourt, who persuades Hollier that he will have Maria back again as, appropriately, a fellow scholar, for certainly Arthur will put the Rabelais in their hands.

The Characters

A hallmark of Robertson Davies’ fiction is his ability to fashion fascinating characters rich in psychological foibles and driven to reveal themselves within the gripping plots he has framed for them. As a moralist, Davies strives to demonstrate that destiny is, in fact, character. Each of the principal characters in The Rebel Angels struggles with a fate embedded within his or her psychological makeup, and at least three of the characters consciously struggle with the components at war within them. They are all intellectuals, and one source of tension arises from this question: Does self-knowledge lead to self-mastery?

For the Reverend Simon Darcourt, attraction to Maria Theotoky causes him to imagine abandoning the freedoms of his self-chosen bachelorhood and—since he is a devout Anglican—the requisite celibacy. At forty-five, Darcourt has drawn considerable creative energy from his chosen style of life. The temptation that Maria represents, in part imagined as a form of completion, is blunted by his knowledge that he has mythologized her into the “Sophia” of his theological studies. Darcourt is drawn to the life of the senses, the life of the mind, and the life of the spirit. As a pudgy scholar-priest, he has already turned into himself, and his dalliance with his brilliant and beautiful student becomes a trial that confirms his identity.

Maria is herself split between her desire to be a fully contemporary Western woman competing successfully in the male domain of scholarly achievement and the pull of her ancestral past with its rich secrets, traditions, and sources of power. As John Parlabane explains to her, she has been identifying and nourishing her crown (intellect) while ignoring, even denying, her root (her cultural and racial inheritance). This imbalance, he warns, is destructive. Slowly, Maria comes to an equilibrium that allows crown and root to grow in proper proportion to each other. A greater freedom comes with the end of denial.

Parlabane, Darcourt, Maria, Hollier, and even the perverse McVarish, are in touch with sources of power by being in touch with the past. They possess, to various degrees, pieces of the collective wisdom and pattern of human life. They are engaged, knowingly, with the archetypal shapes of experience theorized by Carl Jung. Indeed, any student of Davies will eventually have to become a student of Jung to comprehend fully the premises of Davies’ characterizations.

The most colorful character in the novel is Maria’s mother. A gypsy adept, a mistress of various crafts, a summoner of arcane power, a poor imitation of a European sophisticate, and a reluctant Canadian, Madame Laoutaro has enough energy, charm, and magnitude for three or four characters. Yet Davies has made her deliciously credible. Maria has all this to tap, if only her well-trained intellect will let her.

Davies’ characters are moral and philosophical positions in a complex game. Parlabane the skeptic thrives on doubt; Darcourt thrives on a slightly qualified faith; Hollier’s zeal for truth becomes too passionate, too possessive, and his quest to discover the truth of past beliefs becomes momentarily corrupted, as best evidenced by his frenzied request that Madame Laoutaro kill McVarish with a curse. It is Parlabane who actually kills McVarish, but who really knows? What does “actually” mean? In such ways as these, character, fate, meaning, and mystery are intertwined in The Rebel Angels.

Critical Context

The Rebel Angels was the first work to follow Davies’ celebrated The Deptford Trilogy (1983), comprising Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). These spectacular novels lifted Davies from the status of Canadian literary jack-of-all-trades to that of a contemporary world master, a man who wrote with astonishing verbal virtuosity, whose vision significantly expanded the reader’s understanding of human experience, and whose craft expanded the borders of the novel.

In The Rebel Angels, Davies does not surpass the standard of the first two novels of the earlier trilogy, but his level of achievement here certainly solidifies his stature as a novelist of the first rank and an entertainer without peer. The Rebel Angels, though it has an independent life, is part of a projected trilogy that includes an even more ambitious and audacious work, What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), in whose pages the most curious life of Francis Cornish—art restorer, collector, and uncle of Arthur Cornish—is revealed, once again through a dual narration. As in all of Davies’ works, the embracing concerns of these related novels are the manifold ways in which the present of individuals, cultures, and the human species is shaped by the past.

Sources for Further Study

Cude, Wilfred. “The College Occasion as Rabelasian Feast: Academe’s Dark Side in The Rebel Angels,” in Studies in Canadian Literature. VII, no. 2 (1982), pp. 184-199.

Harper’s Magazine. CCLXIV, February, 1982, p. 66.

Library Journal. CVII, January 1, 1982, p. 108.

Mills, John. “Robertson Davies,” in Canadian Writers and Their Works, Vol. 6, 1985. Edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley.

Nation. CCXXXIV, April 24, 1982, p. 500.

The New Republic. CLXXXVI, March 10, 1982, p. 34.

The New Yorker. LVII, February 15, 1982, p. 138.

Newsweek. XCIX, February 8, 1982, p. 78.

Saturday Review. IX, February, 1982, p. 60.

Times Literary Supplement. March 26, 1982, p. 339.