In a lot of ways, she reminds me of late Heinlein characters - have you read his later stuff? He was getting a bit dotty, and wrote some real extended fantasy stuff. She’s second rate Lady MacBeth, really, but her shabiness as a foil is part of what makes her believable as a person.Ībout Liesl. I wish I had my copy of “Fifth Business” with me so I could make sure of the name, but maybe the most compelling female character in the trilogy isn’t Liesl - urbane, yes, but she doesn’t do much to drive the plot or the reader’s emotions - but Boy’s second wife Denyse. So if Davies’ female characters are more two-dimensional than his men - and that’s an if that I can only judge by the Deptford trilogy, which is, of course, narrated by a string of women-bedevilled men - the explanation we can derive from Davies’ own writing might be something along the lines of, those two dimensions are the only thing he, as the author, could identify with in women. He site George Eliot as a woman who wrote men well, and Flaubert’s comment, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” as an explanation of how Bovary ended up being such a well written character. In reference to the discussion of Davies’ female characters, he also routinely brings up the question of whether or not a writer of one sex can competantly write a character of the opposite sex. For some insight into the writing of “Fifth Business”, you guys might want to check that one out, as the success of the first Deptford novel seems to have been very much on Davies mind any time he spoke in a public venue.

I finished up the Deptford trilogy not too long ago, and have recently been reading “The Merry Heart”, a postumous collection of Davies’ bibliophile essays and lectures.

Fifth business book