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Recognition at home was slower in coming. "We Canadians," Davies told TIME Ottawa Bureau Chief Peter Stoler, "are not enthusiasts about our own people." That is no longer true, at least in his case. What's Bred in the Bone has garnered raves from Canadian reviewers. Which seems fitting, since this novel, like most of his other fiction, draws heavily on the author's experiences in his native land. Elements of Francis Cornish's troubled youth come straight from Davies' memories: "As a child, I was beaten up by Catholic kids every day after school. As a newspaperman in that area, I knew families that had idiot children hidden away in attics or barns. It sounds grotesque. But it is the way things were."
Since his retirement from academic duties in 1981, the author and Brenda, his wife of 46 years, have been spending less time at their modern apartment in Toronto and more at their house on 150 acres of land near Lake Ontario. This haven does more than satisfy an author's need for peace and quiet. A vast inland sea once covered the property, and Davies can refresh his conviction that the world is full of surprises every time he finds a fossil in his garden.
Two of the couple's three grown daughters have taken up careers based on the works of Carl Jung, one as a practicing therapist and the other as a scholar and teacher of psychology. "I'm not a born-again Jungian," says Davies of the analyst whose influence is discernible throughout his fiction. "But I find that Jung provides rich feeding for a novelist, with his layers and depth of meaning." Davies' increased leisure has given him more time to read and reread his favorites: Trollope, Dickens, Balzac and Stendhal. "If you pay attention to great literature," he says, "you don't have to have a psychiatrist."
He continues to write, spending up to six hours a day on a novel that will tie up some strings left dangling in his earlier books. He has no inclination to rest on the laurels that have increasingly come his way. "I'm 72," he says, "and I don't like to think that my powers are waning."