First published by Macmillan of Canada in 1970, it is the first installment of Davies' best-known work, the Deptford Trilogy,[1] and explores the life of the narrator, Dunstan Ramsay.

[2] Dunstan Ramsay, an aging history teacher at Colborne College, becomes enraged by the patronizing tone of a newspaper article announcing his recent retirement, which appears to portray him as an unremarkable old man with no notable accomplishments to his name.

Following the birth of her son David, Leola becomes increasingly unhappy with her marriage to Boy, finding herself unable to adjust to high-society life due to her provincial upbringing.

Ramsay's deepening obsession with hagiology leads him to travel to Europe to meet with the Bollandists (a society of Jesuit scholars who chronicle the lives of saints) after they agree to publish one of his articles.

While in Mexico City on a six-month sabbatical from Colborne College, Ramsay attends a magic show put on by the mysterious illusionist Magnus Eisengrim, who is revealed to be an adult Paul Dempster.

Hours later, Boy is found dead in his car after apparently driving into a river, leaving the police unsure whether his death was murder or suicide.

Later, while watching a fortune-telling display at Eisengrim's magic show, Ramsay collapses from a sudden heart attack after someone in the audience cries out "Who killed Boy Staunton?"

A genuinely learned man, Davies wrote a prose that both poked fun at pretentious scholarship and enjoyed joking allusions, as in the names of Ramsay's girl friends, Agnes Day, Gloria Mundy and Libby Doe.

For instance, Mary Dempster is a daft-headed girl who habitually flouts the norms of the society, and so she finds herself ostracised and ridiculed by it, evidenced by the fact that no one comes to her aid when her son runs away.

Dunstan questions the extent that he can provide an accurate account of the events of his childhood or his participation in World War I campaigns, because what he recalls is surely distinct from the 'consensually accepted reality'.

The fantastic nature of their stories were always grounded in actual events, but their miracles were given attention and focus based on the psychosocial attitudes and needs of the day, so that what the public wanted had a large measure of influence over what became the accepted canon.

Davies projected some of his life experiences (childhood in a small Ontario town, family connections with the social and financial elite) into many of his works.

He thought of this novel as "autobiographical, but not as young men do it; it will be rather as Dickens wrote David Copperfield, a fictional reworking of some things experienced and much re-arranged.

"[4] Davies allows us to peer through a window into his childhood in Thamesville, Ontario and through his young life into higher education and beyond through the character of Ramsay and the novels of the Deptford trilogy.

Both men enlisted in World War I, went into politics afterward and held cabinet positions, and strengthened Canada's ties with the mother country.

The most convincing parallel is that Boy becomes the chair of the board of Governors which runs the school at which Ramsay teaches, much as Robertson Davies spent his career at the University of Toronto as the Master of Massey College.