I don't like to be prescriptive, but I do like it when literature has the readability one might associate with more middlebrow works of popular fiction. But that's just a question of bias and narrow experience. Most of my reading is middlebrow, and I cleave to it precisely because it tends to be the home of that quality of readability one craves in one's books. But why shouldn't works of literature have that quality? The people who write them are usually very, very good at what they do. More challenging works, like Ulysses, or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest tower like behemoths over everything else, blotting out the fact that a lot of literature is written to be enjoyed as an experience; more ambitious, perhaps, in terms of human enrichment and intellectual engagement, but fundamentally, enjoyably readable.

All of which is to say, it's nice to be reminded by someone like Robertson Davies that literature can be as readable as a thriller. Or, more accurately perhaps, that thrillers derive much of their readability from the work done in literature.

This strange, entrancing epic of Jungian archetypes loose in the first half of the 20th century begins with spiteful snowball, a premature birth, a mother damaged to the point of disgrace or sainthood and a man raised in a cloying religious community who rejects religion but not spirituality and devotes much of his life to the legends of saints and sainthood. There is a sort of lifelong friendship with the snowball-thrower and involvement with the damaged woman who he comes to regard as a saint and her long-vanished son encountered by chance in the Swiss Tyrol. It's a cunning and enthralling tale that unfolds wonderfully through the narrator's life, full of incident and adventures physical, spiritual and personal, not to mention cast of characters drawn with skill and humour and insight that is both clear-eyed as it is humane.

The Manticore begins where Fifth Business suddenly and dramatically ends, David Staunton, drunk but highly eminent lawyer, flies to Switzerland on the verge of collapse and embarks on an intense and protracted period of Jungian analysis, exploring his childhood and background, some of which has already been glimpsed in Fifth Business, and his troubled relationship with his family, most particularly his father. It is a life laid bare, the traumas and woundings and treatment that created the damaged and troubled man.

Where The Manticore shoots off from the end of Fifth Business, World Of Wonder sets out from the beginning, the terrible fate of Paul Dempster and his long, lonely, squalid and horrific journey to fame and success. Dempster embodies the Jungian Shadow. His lack of education frees him from a certain type of intellectual constraint and prejudice, opening him to a vivid, primitive powerful mode of perception. Raped and kidnapped, his childhood is spent in a carnival and in cheap vaudeville. His talent for sleight of hand illusions and mechanisms is fostered in miserably darkness, but he survives, tough and raw and auto-didactic, he is a dark mirror to David in The Manticore.

What to make of the whole thing? People are the centres of their own stories. One's actions resound and affect the lives of others for good or evil, and one has little control over which. Religion is corrupt and stifling but spirtuality is necessary for a full understanding of life, and that spirituality takes many forms and comes with its own dangers. A rich, heady, humane trilogy, and a masterpiece of 20th century literature.