The Salterton Trilogy by Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies was a Canadian and the trilogy was published in the 1950's. His style of writing is out of style now. Lots of words, piercing observation of his huge cast of mainly arty, middle-class characters, shocking events- fraud, suicide, unbearable domestic situations, laugh out loud dialogue. I was on a bus going through Budleigh Salterton tittering away and I have no idea what the old prune seated next to me thought. Don't care - she did not look like the reading type.

Davies had several hobbies and careers which spilled into one another - academia, music, writing plays and operas, journalism. He lived in Canada with a brief period spent in England. He was widely read.

 Salterton is a fictional Canadian university city that thinks well of itself. Think Exeter or Canterbury. A town where ex-servicemen are respected. It is the fifties so pretty much everyone reads the paper and goes to church (dual setting for book 2). Leaven of Malice won a big prize for humour and Davies has a lot of fun with Humphrey Cobbler the organist. -Spoiler he gets drunk with a bunch of students and they all jig about in the Cathedral and sing 'Man was for Woman Made' on Halloween. A lot of people are into amateur theatre (book 1) and lots like classical music and innovative composition (book 3) Think Angus Wilson if you want a comparable English author writing during the same era.

The book caught my interest after a couple of pages .We learn that the venerable houses of old Salterton were designed by the architect Prebendary Bedlam....

(And to think that I paid £1 in a charity shop for The Salterton Trilogy because I thought it might be about Budleigh!)