‘Reviewers,’ laments the Dr Cake of Andrew Motion’s title, ‘they are devils. Devils. I have seen good men, good authors, broken by their deprecations. The worst of it is their presumption in supposing that those they chastise do not know their own faults, and admonish themselves with a ferocity others can only imagine.’ From a Laureate whose (admittedly rotten) recent poems have been kicked gleefully to death in the public prints, this has the ring of something profoundly felt. There’s a later, rueful allusion to the superiority of the young Wordsworth over the old Wordsworth – ‘the Laureate who now preaches at us’.
There is another reason to be wary of approaching this novel as a reviewer: how to do so without giving away the central surprise in the plot? It steals up on you – and on the narrator – so unexpectedly, and so delightingly, that . . . well, I’m sorry, I’ve thought about it, and I’m afraid there simply isn’t a way to write about The Invention of Dr Cake without giving it away.
Dr Cake is John Keats. The conceit of Motion’s cleverly wrought novel is that Keats secretly survived the consumption which the world believed killed him in Rome, and returned to England under an assumed name to live a life of anonymous philanthropy, practising medicine in a rural backwater. His identity, right at the end of his life, is discovered by another doctor, William Tabor, who visits him while compiling a survey into the health of the rural poor. The book – hedged with a witty pseudo-scholarly preface from Motion – purports to assemble published and unpublished reminiscences of Dr Cake found among Tabor’s papers. The author – at home in this period – has produced an easeful, subtle and absorbing pastiche. It is a reminder, in the face of his laureate poems, of his substantial prose gifts.
Motion uses his story to play with theories of biography, the nature of inspiration, and the character of the Romantic mind. What, he wonders, would make Keats do such a thing? What would be its moral implications and the implications for his happiness? And, having discovered his secret, would Tabor best serve Keats’s posterity by concealing or by publishing his findings?
In Abba Abba, the other great Keats counterfactual, and the obvious point of comparison, Anthony Burgess gave us impasto; Motion’s book is a watercolour. Its tone – even as Tabor makes one of the most exciting literary discoveries imaginable – is mellow, enervated, melancholy; everything suffused with very Keatsian intimations of mortality. Indeed, on more than one occasion, Tabor feels himself and Dr Cake to be already less substantial than the surroundings that will survive them: ‘the scene . . . declared the doctor to be a ghost, and my own self as well’.
Tabor is a rather colourless character. He is somewhat priggish in a gently comical way. An infatuated amateur disciple of the Romantics, he can’t resist lobbing Aeolian harps and Ancient Mariners into his text, or observing that hollyhocks in an English village ‘sway unregarded in the desert air’. You can sense his pride when, at Dr Cake’s funeral, he is told, ‘You knew him better than most.’
There’s a whiff in that of the opening chapters of The Third Man. Even when Tabor discovers who Dr Cake used to be, there remains the more complex question of who he is now. Dr Cake, like Harry Lime, is an elusive essence. When he finally dies, he is buried in a coffin bearing a blank brass nameplate.
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