The Cunning Man.

After presiding over a murderer's deathbed confession, the narrator of Robertson Davies's latest novel reflects that "life is not wholly a dull fabric of commonplaces and likelihoods." Indeed, as one might expect from an installment of Davies's stylized and hyper-readable fiction, The Cunning Man presents us with lives containing an economical number of likelihoods and almost no commonplaces at all. Fleeting past miracles, murders, a spiritual awakening in a bathtub during the London Blitz, a spiritual downfall in a boarding-school dormitory, and an Anglican church scandal that turns into Dostoevskian tragedy, the narrative vaults through the decades leaving mundane experiences tumbling in its wake. The events of decades are distilled into a handful of brightly colored images, and everyday relationships yield the raw material of legend.

Encompassing several narratives that intersect at an Anglican church in Toronto, The Cunning Man is principally the story of its narrator, Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a shrewd, unconventional physician whose heroes are Paracelsus and Richard Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. In a set-up typical of Davies, whose writing favors characters reminiscing at length to interested and occasionally querulous listeners, Hullah is launched into reflection when a journalist consults him for an article on "The Toronto that Used to Be." Partly for her benefit and partly for his own, Hullah recalls his childhood in rural Ontario, his education, his medical apprenticeship as an army doctor during World War II, and his experiences in private practice as a diagnostician of eccentric methods, such as smelling his patients to find out what is wrong with them.

Along the way he paints vivid portraits of his acquaintances, including several hypochondriacs, a beautiful Irish gynecologist, a giantScotsman who powders his face green, two British lesbians who hold artistic salons and rate attendees according to susceptibility to the seven deadly sins, and a former naval officer reputed to have shared a meal with cannibals. Of particular importance is a strange, devout boy whom Hullah first meets at boarding school: Charlie Iredale, who treasures a copy of The Monastic Diurnal, and stays calm through unanaesthetized surgery by listening to the lives of the saints read aloud.

All of these encounters prepare the narrator to witness the drama that takes place at Saint Aidan's Church, when Charlie is a curate there. Hullah himself has joined this particular congregation after a bout of interdenominational church-hopping convinced him that "You must find the church that suits you, that you can stand and that can stand you, and stick with it."

Saint Aidan's suits him because its use of near-medieval liturgies makes it so "high church" as to strain the boundaries of the Anglican Communion altogether. Under the sway of Darcy Dwyer, a choirmaster obsessed with ceremony (who happens to have played the role of Mephistopheles in a local production of Faust), the congregation attracts the ire of its bishop, who sends an archdeacon to preach on the Church of England's doctrinal Thirty-Nine Articles. Episcopal authorities are even less pleased when Charlie Iredale starts a campaign to canonize a priest who keeled over during the Good Friday service. Charlie is banished to diocesan Siberia, but support for the local saint survives as a cult on Saint Aidan's fringes.

Here Davies is taking up a theme he addressed more concentratedly in Fifth Business, the first volume of his Deptford Trilogy. That book's narrator, historian and hagiographer, Dunstan Ramsay, finds his calling when the otherworldly benevolence of a village simpleton sends him on a quest for the meaning of sainthood. Ramsay makes a brief appearance in The Cunning Man, and the cameo draws attention to the difference between the two books. Fifth Business, and the other volumes in the Deptford Trilogy, are books in which theme and narrative structure are so perfectly matched that each seems to drive the other. Each book starts out with a question about a character, and answers that question until the novel's format is exhausted.

In comparison, The Cunning Man seems diffuse. Its questions are many and varied. What is the essence of health, and of the healer's art? What is the right balance between wisdom and knowledge, humanism and science? What is sin? (A favorite question of Darcy Dwyer, who, like many Davies characters, likes to philosophize at length, with unrealistic eloquence.) When does elaborate ritual stop being a path to God and become "theological snobbery"?

These issues shift in and out of the narrative's scope just as some of the characters do, and the lack of focus makes for a book that is in some ways frustrating. It would be interesting to know, for example, how Charlie Iredale, the arrogant curate, grew from the earnest child who demanded of a boarding-school friend, "I never see you pray....How do you keep your accounts balanced?" But since Charlie vanishes from the book during his intermediate years, his adult motivations are never completely comprehensible.

Though a student of human nature, Hullah, for his part, doubts that it is ever possible to understand the essence of another person. He himself learned early in life, he says, to be "cunning" in concealing his true character, and even by the end of the book his personality is still elusive, despite the fact that he analyzes it with the same sharp attention he turns on his acquaintances.

But Hullah's "cunning" is wisdom as well as duplicity. His medical experience has taught him that it is no use treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease, and so when he observes the failures and losses of the people around him, he cannot keep from considering how they have brought their fates on themselves. Rather like the victims of "friendly fire" he treats during World War II, his friends and neighbors are wounded by their own excesses of love and zeal, chief among them being Charlie, who had hoped to bring to Toronto "a revival of deep faith."

"Turn the Wizard toward the light, and you see that he is also the Fool," says Hullah, who likes to think of himself as a connoisseur of irony. He is the latest in the line of Davies characters alerted to the patterns in life, patterns that tend to become more and more spectacular the more commonplaces are removed.