Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross, and destined to be caught in a no-man’s-land where memory, history and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy proves, in the end, neither innocent nor innocuous. The first novel in the celebrated Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business stands alone as the remarkable story of a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.
