Canadian novelist, playwright, essayist, and man of letters; for the second half of the 20th century the most internationally recognized Canadian writer of fiction, and the public face of a distinctively Canadian literary voice that had not quite existed before him. Davies was the son of a Welsh-Canadian newspaper publisher, read English at Oxford (Balliol), acted briefly at the Old Vic in London, returned to run his family's paper The Peterborough Examiner for two decades, and then reinvented himself as the founding Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, where he presided — bearded, tweedy, theatrical — for a further two decades. The novels on which his reputation rests were almost all written in that Massey period.
Davies's three linked trilogies — the Salterton Trilogy (Tempest-Tost, 1951; Leaven of Malice, 1954; A Mixture of Frailties, 1958), the Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, 1970; The Manticore, 1972; World of Wonders, 1975), and the Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, 1981; What's Bred in the Bone, 1985; The Lyre of Orpheus, 1988) — together form a comedy of Canadian manners that is also, improbably and consistently, a sustained fictional investigation of Jungian depth psychology. Fifth Business, his best-known novel, takes its title from the opera-company role of the character who is neither protagonist nor love interest but without whom the plot cannot turn — and makes of its narrator, Dunstan Ramsay, the classic Jungian figure of the man who has neglected his own inner life and must belatedly reckon with it. The Manticore is constructed as an extended Jungian analysis — the protagonist Staunton in Zurich, working through a rigorous course of analytic psychotherapy whose technical vocabulary Davies renders with unusual accuracy.
The Jungian commitments are not decorative. Davies read Jung for most of his adult life, corresponded with Jungian analysts, and organized his fiction around the Jungian picture of the psyche: the necessity of confronting the shadow, the presence of anima and animus as the contrasexual archetypes within the self, the persona as the social mask whose over-identification with the ego becomes a source of pathology, the Self as the integrative center toward which the mature life moves. His characters are Jungian in construction, and his plots enact Jungian trajectories of individuation — but always inside the comedy of Canadian small-town, university, and theatrical life that gave him his surface subjects. Among 20th-century novelists, few took the Jungian framework as literally or rendered it as skillfully into the texture of realist fiction.