My renewed love for Davies is confirmed in this, the second volume of the Salterton trilogy. I find Davies' approach to series totally unique, as he creates a new story in the same setting, featuring "secondary" characters, proving that character is undoubtedly a pillar of fiction. We met the Vambraces and Solly Bridgetower in the opening volume, Tempest Tost, as they were all involved with the titular play. This story takes place nearly 3 years after those events, and finds Solly and Pearl, who had barely a passing acquaintance in Tempest, tied together by some kind of prank or joke, which publicly links them in a fictional engagement. Over the course of a week or so, the tempers and lives of those characters, along with several newly introduced ones, are revealed, and utterly changed by this event. I also love that the story could be set in any time period, as Davies doesn't note technology or politics or world events that would situate the story in time (though I looked it up, and this particular trilogy was written in the 1950s). It is entirely and unapologetically Canadian though, and knows itself thus, slyly mentioning aspects of the local culture that perhaps only a Canadian would truly understand. His language is descriptive and readable, his stories simple and relatable. Pure love. ( )

“Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness that we may always serve Thee in pureness of living and truth”

- The Prayer Book

Yes, I’m opening with the quote that prefaces the book again, because it has some relevance to the book at hand. I am that deficient in creativity. Anyway, [b:Leaven of Malice|48270|Leaven of Malice (Salterton Trilogy, #2)|Robertson Davies|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469066564l/48270._SY75_.jpg|1010107] is the second in the Salterton trilogy by [a:Robertson Davies|23129|Robertson Davies|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1225671081p2/23129.jpg], in which a fallacious engagement notice naming Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace gets published by the ill-fated newspaper The Bellman. Pearl’s father, Professor Walter Vambrace, is so deeply insulted by the notice that he immediately threatens to sue them for libel, and some especially dim-witted Saltertonians take the notice a little too seriously.

Strangely enough, this book functions quite well as a standalone. It doesn’t use the story of [b:Tempest-Tost|347358|Tempest-Tost (Salterton Trilogy, #1)|Robertson Davies|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1290198660l/347358._SY75_.jpg|1967443] as a starting point so much as the characters, so the result plays out like a completely different story possessed of characters with an implied shared history. The relation between Solly and Griselda Webster, or more accurately the lack thereof, might be especially strange to newcomers, considering how big a deal is made of Solly’s continued infatuation with a girl who doesn’t bother to come back from England. I’d still recommend reading Tempest-Tost though, if only to get a better sense of the characters’ relationships, and also because it’s a good book. At least, I think it is.

I find this book gives a better sense of Salterton’s culture than the first book did. More time is devoted to the religious customs of the populace, and more is also shown of the traditions the locals indulge, most of which seem to be relegated to the home. As with the first book, the characters are the book’s strongest area, and all everyone who returns remains a point of interest. The new characters are also nice, especially the Bellman’s editor, Gloster Ridley with his neuroticisms and mostly well-founded fear for the future of his publication. It’s Professor Vambrace that especially held my interest, though; the worst we saw of him in Tempest-Tost was that he can be quite pretentious when he wants to be, but he shows a capacity for (mostly misdirected) anger that i didn’t think he had in him. He’s easily the most fearsome of the bunch, but his rage can also provide some comic relief.

Some of the characters’ motivations felt somewhat far-fetched; I have a hard time believing that anyone as perpetually angry and vengeful as Vambrace would be tolerated in academia, and the motive of the culprit who drafted the false engagement notice was also kind of weaksauce to me. Speaking of which, how anyone failed to notice the laughably wrong date November 31 on the notice is beyond me.

Though the characters’ actions and motivations sometimes stretch credulity, I find Leaven of Malice to be an improvement to its antecedent. It reveals more about the traditions and and values of Salterton’s residents, and the premise and the way people react to it lends itself well to comedy. I also find that his more playful early efforts have taken on some new context in light of his more serious and thoughtful future books, but that’s something for a review if [b:A Mixture of Frailties|48271|A Mixture of Frailties (Salterton Trilogy, #3)|Robertson Davies|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386925042l/48271._SY75_.jpg|47224]. ( )

El anuncio, en un periódico local, del falso compromiso matrimonial entre dos jóvenes de la alta sociedad de Salterton revoluciona la vida en la ciudad. El padre de la supuesta novia, el profesor Vambrace, no está dispuesto a olvidar una ofensa que él considera injuriosa y su anunciada demanda podría tener consecuencias impredecibles. Mientras, en la redacción del Evening Bellman se desata una tormenta en la que se ven inmersos su afable director, que teme que esa broma sin importancia pueda hacer peligrar viejos proyectos; la intrigante nuera del dueño del periódico y uno de los redactores más veteranos. Y el resto de la ciudad también se convierte en un hervidero de rumores. ¿Qué tienen que ver en el escándalo el alocado organista de la catedral o un advenedizo profesor de canto? ¿Cómo se tomarán los supuestos novios el anuncio? Tras A merced de la tempestad, la vetusta ciudad de Salterton fue de nuevo el escenario de Levadura de malicia, la segunda novela de Robertson Davies, en la que retrató, con su magistral ironía, la tranquila vida provinciana de una ciudad canadiense

A funny, whimsical tale that increased my word power. I always feel smarter after I have read Davies, whether I am or not is another matter. ( )

The more of Davies' novels you read, the more absurdly pleasant his general worldview becomes, like a landscape painting where the harmony and attraction of each detail increases the more of the vista you see. As you finish each one it becomes almost aggravating that you can't live in his world: a place of enormous good humor, full of interest and mischief, where every evil has been abolished, vices are merely virtues imperfectly expressed, conflicts stem from lapses in authenticity rather than flaws in character, imperfections are cause for affection instead of disdain, each remark is an apothegm, talents are equal to the levels of dreams, love is an honest quest rather than a tournament of degradation, small towns are comforting without being confining, and each house and church and school can be loved for what it is, whole and complete in itself. Not that bad things don't occur, or that the usual trials of life are absent, but that at some level everything will turn out all right in the end, and that everyone's actions will be revealed as the honest efforts of well-meaning seekers rather than the ineffectual struggles of hapless motes in a storm.

It's easy to get florid about Davies' writing style, because it's a lot of fun to read, and you get the impression, which is sadly rarer than it should be, that he had a lot of fun writing his books. He's kind of like Wodehouse in that way, but slightly less silly. There's a lot going on in his sentences, but they're written so smoothly you almost don't notice, and he never shades into prolixity. However, more appealing than his sentences are his characters. He's got a way of summing people up while hinting at their broader personalities that makes them very appealing. They're like hilarious stock characters that happen to have been made manifest: the haughty professor, the offbeat psychologist, the solemn newspaper editor, the self-indulgent elderly writer, the over-dutiful priest, the officious lawyer, the irreverent church organist (you didn't know that church organist is an archetype? well apparently it is), and so on. And what makes them most relatable is that they're often fully convinced of their own importance, motivated above all by the need to maintain their dignity and avoid looking foolish, and so they act out of amusingly small-minded spite towards each other on typically mistaken premises.

This novel loosely follows after Tempest-Tost a few years later. A false wedding announcement between Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace has been placed in The Bellman, Salterton's newspaper, by an unknown person. This leads Pearl's father, Professor Vambrace to attempt to sue the paper, managed by editor Gloster Ridley, to salvage his wounded pride, given that he has nursed a long-standing grudge against the Bridgetower family. This dispute, and the efforts to reveal the mysterious perpetrator of the false annunciation, ends up involving many other characters of interest in the town. After many twists and turns, the culprit is uncovered and Solly and Pearl make an important decision. The plot is well-constructed and funny all the way through, but here were my favorite scenes:

- Ridley confronting the old buffoon writer Swithin Shilito ("What about the barber’s chair; might there not be a few buttocks for Shillito?")
- Professor Vambrace acting like a detective to track down Ridley's residence, for legal research purposes
- the aggressively forced humor of the party that Yarrow the psychologist throws
- Solly Bridgetower making fun of Heavysege, the Important Writer he's supposed to write a thesis on
- the final confrontation at the end, leading to the revelation of the mischief-maker's identity

And you have to resist the temptation to quote endlessly, but here were some of my favorite lines:

"This was, perhaps, the voice of the people, and the voice of the people, no editor is ever permitted to forget, is the voice of God. It was a pity, he reflected, that God's utterances needed such a lot of editorial revision."

"Mr. Shillito loved to watch people reading what he had written, and as he did so he would smile, grunt appreciatively, nod and in other ways indicate enjoyment and admiration until all but the strongest were forced by a kind of spiritual pressure to follow his lead. In his way, the old fellow was a bully; he was so keen in his appreciation of himself and his work that not to join him became a form of discourtesy."

"But all the while he was thinking up crushing retorts which he should have made when the opportunity served. There is nothing worse for the digestion than this, and before he went to bed the Dean took a glass of hot milk and two bismuth tablets."

"It would probably be unjust to Miss Laura Pottinger to describe her as a busybody; she preferred to think of herself as one who possessed a strong sense of her responsibility toward others."

"Gin had come to Dutchy like fire from heaven. At the first swallow she was conscious of that shock of recognition with which psychologists and literary critics are so familiar. It was as though, all her life, she had been dimly aware of the existence of some miraculous essence, some powerful liberating force, some enlightening catalyst, and here it was! It was gin! Why be nervous about being a prof's wife, why worry about a party going well, when gin could make the crooked straight and the rough places plain? Dutchy, as Norm laughingly said, had taken to gin as a duck takes to water."

"If every story has to be a love-story, you'll never have any originality, for a less original creature than a human being in love cannot be found." ( )