Product Description

Catching his wife with his one-time colleague, Gil Gilmartin is murdered by the latter and lingers on as a ghost who must spend his afterlife sitting next to his killer at an otherworldly film festival. Reprint. NYT.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #357682 in Books
• Published on: 1992-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Davies's fans will not be disappointed by this clever novel, narrated posthu mously by a newspaper editor cuck olded and killed by a film critic.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In his latest novel, the elder statesman of Canadian letters continues to explore the themes of sin, guilt, and self-discovery--the twist being that in this case the hero's discovery of self comes only after he is dead. Indeed, Connor Gilmartin ("Gil") is murdered in the novel's first sentence by a co-worker he discovers in bed with his (Gil's) wife. The indignity of being snuffed by "the Sniffer," a theater-cum-movie critic, is compounded when Gil is seemingly condemned to spend his afterlife seated next to his nemesis at a film festival. But what Gil sees--unlike the rest of the audience--is a series of highly personal films starring an assortment of ancestors. As "his" festival progresses, he develops a "sense of life more poignant and more powerful than anything I ever knew when I was a living man." While Davies's interest in metaphysics and Jungian psychology is evident, it never overshadows his story or his compassion for his characters. A masterful effort that should appeal to a wide audience; highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/91.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A jovial but haltingly uneven tale of how several generational strands came to form one eccentric family. In rural Wales, a devout Methodist family rises slowly from poverty to 19th-century mercantile respectability, only to be spiritually and financially broken through a combination of hubris and bad luck. Davies's depiction of how the descendants of Samuel Gilmartin came to emigrate to British North America convincingly blends gritty humor--including a hilarious Welsh cursing contest- -with sympathetic portrayals of his characters. But operating at several registers below this Welsh plotline is the earlier, and much more thinly drawn, episode of how the Loyalist Gage family emigrated to Upper Canada following the American Revolution. The Gages never fully come to life, and when they paddle a canoe up the Hudson River all the way to Ontario, we've departed from familiar Davies territory and entered the realm of historical romance. Moreover, the two family episodes are organized around the kind of premise that is great fun at first, but that quickly begins to look irrelevant: the spirit of a recently murdered man finds himself attending a film festival alongside his murderer, a persnickety arts-critic nicknamed ``the Sniffer.'' While the Sniffer reviews official festival fare, his murder victim, Connor Gilmartin, is captivated by documentary footage covering his family history, which he alone can see. Strapped to this structural frame, the two plotlines inevitably begin to wobble. And though the trademark Davies preoccupations are here--skeletons creaking in the familial closets, money, spirituality--they're pitched far below the high- water mark the author achieved with What's Bred in the Bone (1988) and Lyre of Orpheus (1989). Minor work from a major talent--though there are enough flashes of former glory here to make this a must for serious fans. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

The cinema of life.
This book was a pleasure to read. Though not a favourite of mine, it is more tender in a way than any of Davies' novels. It is slower than some of his earlier work and deals more intimately and thoroughly with the family history of the (ghost-)narrator. It may seem odd to say so but it's as if Davies is reviewing his own life, or aspects of it. A recommended read to the old man's fans.

WE DIE AND LEARN
Let me tell you, Davies wrote one helluva book here, and I absolutely adore Murther and Walking Spirits. It's very rooted in Eastern philosophy and is in many ways opposed to the western views on death. Westerners tend to view death as a failure or an embarassment and not as the natural course of things, like the Easterners do. This novel parodies the insincere, uncomprehending views on death that many of us hold. Davies also brings things into perspective on a larger scale by tracing Gilmartin's (the dead protagonist) ancestors, from his great-great-great grandparents up to his parents through a film festival of sorts, helping his spirit to realize what death, life, and the 'hero-struggle' really means in the long run, or the never-ending now. If anyone found this book underwhelming, it may be because Davies did not explain the character's development for the reader in clear terms, assuming perhaps they were bright enough to catch it on their own. It takes more than a little bit of thinking to get this book, and I've been doing a lot of that since I finished reading it. Davies has taught me a lot, and I highly recommend his fictions to any and everyone.

Great book, albeit "roughly translated"!
An interesting book, I really enjoyed it. Who else but R. Davies could kill off his main character in the first sentence, and then chronicle the experiences of the disembodied ghost for over three and a half hundred pages... and yet keep it increasingly interesting? He does it. Incidentally, Davies believed that physical death would not spell the annihilation of the animating spirit of man (a belief to which I am in full agreement). He once speculated about his own afterlife by saying: "I haven't any notion of what I might be or whether I'll be capable of recognizing what I've been, or perhaps even what I am, but I expect that I shall be something." Murther is a really interesting fictional account of what that "something" might be like.

The moment that Connor Gilmartin is struck dead in his own bedroom by his wife's lover, he finds that he is still alive! Perhaps even more alive than he has ever been; he is in a state that the opening chapter calls "roughly translated". He's a ghost; a walking spirit. This new state is fraught with all manner of possibilities and limitations. For one thing, his powers of awareness and observation are heightened, but he is unable to communicate with any of the living, no matter how he jumps up and down or shouts in their ear. And for that typically Robertsonian twist, the great author borrows an idea from the Bhagavad Gita which states that after death one maintains a connection with what one was thinking about at the moment of death. (It behoved a man to be concerned with what he was thinking of as he died)! So... what was Connor Gilmartin thinking of at that moment? Well, he was processing the fact that he had just caught his wife involved with a man (a co-worker) whom he particularly despised for many reasons, and secondly, he was thinking of a particular work-related problem concerning an upcoming Film Festival in Toronto to which this man (his murderer) was vying with him for position as lead writer. Now Connor is dead, aware of his wife's duplicity in covering up the murder but unable to vindicate himself in any way, and furthermore he is bound inextricably to his own murderer who attends the Film Festval as lead writer in his place. In a surreal twist, at the Film Festival, what Connor views on the screen is not what the others are seeing, but rather it is a documentary of his own ancestry... (one's life flashes before one's eyes??) He is seeing something wholly personal. After the festival he is instantly translated back to see how his wife is winding up her affairs... he sees that she has actually found a way to profit from his untimely demise. This story was great right to the end... with the disclaimer that in my opinion it is important to remember it as a fanciful rather than a literal view of what happens after your last breath. He raises a lot of interesting things to think about though. Not the best example of Davies' work, but still worthy of four and a half stars to the best Canadian writer ever.