18 March, 2002: High Spirits
High Spirits is a collection of ghost stories. More specifically, it's a collection of Christmas ghost stories: humorous Christmas ghost stories set at Massey College at the University of Toronto. That's a rather specialized niche. Robertson Davies didn't write these stories for publication, as I understand it; they were to be read at the college's annual Christmas party. And they read like that. Reading about Davies encountering the ghosts of various British and Canadian political figures is amusing, but it must have been great to hear him perform; you can tell just by looking at the cover photo that Davies did funny voices. My enjoyment of these little vignettes is somewhat hampered by not knowing jack about Canadian politics (I'd be hard-pressed to say when William Mackenzie was in power, much less what his personal fobiles were), but the stories breeze by, and the ones that don't require knowledge of snowback politics -- encounters with creators of artificial life, with the saints removed from the liturgical calendar in 1969, with the spirit of sexism, with the Devil himself -- are quite entertaining. High Spirits is probably not worth reading in a clump, but they'd make fine stories to read around a roaring fire; you could start a Christmas tradition.