Discussions of Davies' first three novels—the so-called Salterton trilogy—tend to emphasize his comic and satiric vision. By contrast, criticism and discussion of the Deptford trilogy—[Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders] …—have focussed on the psychological and religious dimensions of the novels and Davies' substantial debt to the thought of the Swiss analytical psychologist C. G. Jung. Filaments of continuity are evident between the two trilogies but there is no doubt that Davies' reputation as well as his almost unchallenged status as a serious thinker, sage or pundit … depends on the later body of work. In this case the common view is at least partly right since there's little doubt that Fifth Business is Davies' masterpiece and together with The Stone Angel, The Scorched-Wood People and Coming Through Slaughter, among the handful of Canadian novels that count. (p. 30)

Davies' concern in his later work has been with man's need to acknowledge the emotional, the irrational and the unconscious side of the self…. The central figures of Fifth Business and The Manticore suffer from an excessive dependence on conscious or rational modes of being, and the action of each novel moves towards a moment of recognition in which we witness the return of what has been repressed/suppressed and the consequent development of an integrated self…. Up to a point, the second and third novels repeat, with many entertaining variations, the pattern of Fifth Business; each is in the form of a confession, each has essentially the same theme and each borrows its images and symbols from a common store of relatively arcane lore.

In fact, much of the pleasure … one gets from reading these later novels, including The Rebel Angels derives from the sense of déja vu experienced from novel to novel, from the elements of predictability in the whole enterprise. Davies' learning may be arcane and exotic but we expect this from him just as we expect his narrators to explain it in detail, whether dealing with fool-saints (Fifth Business), the Jungian anima (The Manticore), or body types and the shit cure (The Rebel Angels). Similarly the issues posed by, explored and explained in these novels are constant from work to work: the unconscious side of life, the integrated self, the unlived life, and "the over-developed mind and the under-developed heart." As well these novels are accessible, even comfortable, in a way that the major works of modernism and post-modernism aren't. To read John Barth is to confront a conjuror doing several illusions simultaneously; Davies, in contrast, is the scholarly and avuncular magician and story-teller who is willing to explain every trick. Even the ostensibly opaque elements in his fiction are ultimately rendered translucent, and therefore knowable and safe.

Yet if the reader derives pleasure from Davies' writing and rewriting of his one story and one story only, there is also the other side of predictability and familiarity, tedium. Fifth Business worked because we saw Dunstan Ramsay again and developing page by page, and because Davies managed to integrate into the theme, style and structure Ramsay's interest in hagiography. The tedium increases between The Manticore and The Rebel Angels because the novels become increasingly static, cluttered with the flotsam of Davies' store of learning and, surprising in a drama scholar and critic, less dramatic. After Fifth Business the scholar-didact has prevailed over the novelist in Davies' fiction.

More than its immediate predecessors The Rebel Angels creaks under an excess of intellectual baggage, this time drawn from Rabelais, Paracelsus and gypsy lore. A combination of a murder-mystery novel and comic love story, The Rebel Angels is set at a Canadian university and has three related concerns: the search for and recovery of a previously unpublished manuscript and three letters by Rabelais showing him to have been interested in the kabbala and alchemy; Maria Theotoky's desire to acknowledge and understand her gypsy past (her intuitive and emotional side); and the philosopher John Parlabane's return to St. John's College, and his attempt to publish a novel….

The novel's main weakness is that Maria is just too static and undeveloped a character to sustain a novel structurally and thematically dependent on her. Unlike Monica Gall, the appealing heroine of A Mixture of Frailties, she never convinces us to take her emotional turmoil, her anxieties, seriously. Her gypsy past is finally just so much costume and scenery…. (p. 31)

Much more interesting and more fully realized is the reprobate John Parlabane who specializes in various forms of debauchery and in "the history of skepticism: the impossibility of real knowledge—no certainty of truth." Parlabane is the true rebel angel in that he embodies and exemplifies the repressed-suppressed aspects of the self talked about in the rest of the novel. He is the "Wild Man" whose life and learning can be paradoxically and disturbingly exemplary; while Maria talks about gypsies and studies Rabelais, John Parlabane lives a Rabelaisian life.

Not surprisingly the novel only comes alive when Parlabane is present, as if Davies' imagination responds to his contradictory qualities with a depth and complexity of realization notably lacking in his more staid academic figures; with Parlabane we have the stench of brimstone, with Hollier and Darcourt the grey mustiness of the university common room. Like all of Davies' characters Parlabane talks too much but unlike most of them he doesn't treat living and talking as synonymous terms. His words and actions are the closest Davies has yet come to giving adequate fictional expression to his sense of preconscious or pre-rational modes of being. In the earlier novels we rarely experience the shudder of recognition that should attend an encounter, direct or mediated, with the unknown, the irrational or, in Fifth Business, the numinous. Davies' treatment of the emotions, the unconscious, and the religious dimensions in life (often they are identical) is usually unconvincing because it fails to evoke the sense or ambience of the irrational and the unknown. This is partly a matter of an overly controlled even repressive style, partly of characters too obviously intended to represent or symbolize attitudes and modes of being, and partly of a comic mode that may not be a suitable medium for a certain kind of subject.

As a result, Davies' pronouncements on the self and religion tend to sound like good news for modern man, secular (because psychologized) assurances about vaguely spiritual matters. The reader, entertained by an often lively and engaging story, also finds himself sitting through a painless, often entertaining and witty, lecture or sermon. The obvious contrast is with a disturbing novel like Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent Into Hell in which the encounter with the repressed side of life is made palpable because the style, imagery and plot compel the reader into as direct a confrontation as possible; we experience the novel's reality, whereas in Davies we all too often sense that we have been told about it. The telling has been witty, elegant and informed, and the vehicle has been often absorbing and entertaining but there remains a rupture between the potentially disruptive subject matter and the orderly and restrained telling. (pp. 31, 47)

What we have then in The Rebel Angels, as in its predecessors, is both an enjoyable novel from a writer who knows how to tell a story in a highly polished style, and another reminder of the extent to which Davies' fiction is seriously divided against itself. (p. 47)