The Ivory Tower

ROBERTSON DAVIES'S new book features a quintessential Jane Austen heroine. Miss Maria Magdalena Theotoky is every bit as articulate, independent and charming as Elizabeth Darcy And like Austen. Davies fuses a titillating, almost melodramatic plot with an effortless yet penetrating treatment of themes.

His setting is not Victorian England but a modern university in Ontario a cloistered enclave of Renaissance scholarship housing characters whose somber public lives belie the sensational reality of their private existences Maria, a graduate student who insists on interpreting all events in terms of Rabelais and Parcelsus, narrates half the chapters. The others are voiced by the Reverend Simon Dar-court, a professor of religion who is writing a series of meditations on the modern university.

Not surprisingly. The Rebel Angels focuses mostly on the tension between the cerebral and spiritual, the practical and intellectual in modern life. It is no accident that by the end Maria has married a young financier named Arthur Cornish; the intellectual community has come to respect him, recognizing that his business-like attitude and practicality are supported by sensitivity, culture and a freshness of perception. His liking for orthodoxy, for example, is in fact not a cheap attempt at culture but a bias which he is capable of defending intellectually.

Davies admirably captures the urbane, though at times precious style of these academics. Searching for precision and the effect of spontaneity, they say things like:

The architect of Spook knew his business, so it was not hideous, but it was full of odd corners and architecturally indefensible superfluities, and these rooms where Hollier lived were space-wasting and inconvenient.

Nevertheless, expert dialogue sustains the novel. Sample the glib openness of Parlabane, whose career has included a bout as a gay, sado-masochistic academic (at Princeton, no less), a stint as a drug trafficker in Greece, and time done in a monastery. Still wearing his monk's habit, he has come back to the university to sponge off his former colleagues, and, of course, to write the modern Proust. Davies blends in Parlabane's speech the erstwhile academic, mincing clergyman, mincing homosexual, and streetwise manipulator:

"Was Rabelais truly one of those nasty, divisive reformers' Did he dig with the same foot as they pestilent fellow Luther' a dirty-minded man. And as a great despiser of women, if I recollect properly, though it's years since I read his blundering, coarse-fibred romance about the giants. But we mustn't quarrel; we must live together in holy charity. I've seen Dear Clem since last we talked, and he says it's all right for me to stay. I wouldn't fuss him about it if I were you He seems to have great things on his mind."

It is a measure of Davies' gift with dialogue that Parlabane, so tire-some to his contemporaries, never disintegrates in print into a conglomeration, of stereotypes.

IN ONE INSTANCE only does Davies' characterization disappoint. Maria is half-Gypsy, a fact which she conceals partly out of a fear of making herself interesting in a cheap way, but also because her garlicky, long-skirted mother does not conform to her self-image, her need for smooth modernity and rationality. Maria's ostensible embarrassment over her heritage is a dirty trick to play. She is too finely tuned to admit this sort of flaw blithely; by nature a vivid personality. She must and does go to great lengths to avoid trite melodrama. The words she utters at the end of the play are too cliched to be the credible product of the Maria whose quick intellect has stunned us in earlier dialogues: "We're serious people. I am much more serious, much more real for having accepted my Gypsy root."

That Maria is ashamed of her heritage in part disappoints because the truth in the cliche is not supplemented by the quirky and stimulating observations Davies offers elsewhere. The need of the intellectual to "farce out" the essential, the orthodox and the ritual in life, as cooks work at the "extending and amplifying of a dish with other, complementary elements" is a central theme of the novel. It forms the basis for a plea for the introduction of intellectual vitality into religious life, and in a broader sense, becomes a justification for the Humanities--a concern which many modern universities find themselves forced to address. Darcourt becomes a spokesman for these issues when he elaborates upon his refusal to add to Parlabane's "fund." Parlabane challenges:

Has your faith been so eroded by your life...when you recite the Creed, do you mean what you say? Every word. But the change is that I also believe a great many other things that aren't in the Creed. It's shorthand, you know. Just what's necessary. But I don't live merely by what is necessary...

In keeping with this philosophy, Davies' book delights shamelessly in the unnecessary--in gossip and cheap sex (that is, $25 for Parlabane if he'll spend a day in a nightie and granny capteasing a bachelor professor with a long pink velvet ribbon) and splendid one-liners. The last word on the Humanities perhaps belongs to a physiology professor, tipsy at the close of a long-winded faculty dinner. In response to the essential orthodox remark that the Humanities are, after all, about Civilization, he begins to lecture:

Civilization rests on two things...the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both? Sophie Volpp