Conceit by Mary Novik

I absolutely loved this book. Each page was a pleasure. Conceit by Mary Novik is set in seventeenth century London and the majority of the novel is from the perspective of Pegge Donne, the youngest daughter of the metaphysical poet and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral John Donne. Metaphysical poetry has a reputation for being a bit complicated, a little obscure, and heavy on religion and sex. I was not sure therefore what to expect here and whether the flavour, so to speak, of metaphysical poetry would really translate well to the novel form.

Pegge is a warm and lively girl in love with Izaak Walton of The Compleat Angler fame. She wants not the arranged marriage of social and pecuniary advantage but the kind of passion her parents had when they were young; the kind of passion that made them run away and landed John Donne temporarily in prison. He famously ended a letter from Fleet Prison with "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done", after his marriage to Anne More. Walton however continues to elude Pegge.

Pegge's feelings echo much of Donne's most famous poems. Donne's early poetry certainly seethes with physical emotion, Elegy XX being a prime example. The passion of the marriage of the Donnes certainly bore fruit, 12 children in 16 years of marriage, before Anne's inevitable death as result of her last childbirth.

At the time of the main narrative Donne is old, dying and quite a character. He plays the role of sanctimonious Dr Donne beautifully, preserving his clerical reputation and trying to forget his rather more lively past. The contrasts between his age and Pegge's youth, between what he wants for her now and what he once enjoyed himself is marked. Pegge is a disappointment and a handful because she is too like him. Despite everything there is a lovely warmth to their relationship.

Pegge is a lovely guide to seventeenth century London. Walton is a robust, stoical figure, oddly unromantic, but he clearly drives Pegge wild. And despite his constant passion for her older sister Con the friendship between Pegge and  Walton is real and persists.

London too rises from this novel in clear focus.The poverty, riches, sights and smells emanate from the page as lively and as infuriating as Pegge. From the start Pegge and the city mirror each other; a prolepsis set during the Fire of London when Donne's St Paul's is lost shows Pegge sooty and bedraggled as her city. Pegge's concern in the heat of the fire is to rescue her father's monument, the designing of which later forms a lively part of the narrative. We see from her husband William's point of view:

Crates and baskets and rounds of cheese are piled helter-skelter on the quay since there are no boats left to ferry goods across the river. The desperate have set their possessions adrift, hoping to recover them with boat-hooks when they float below the bridge. William's hand flutters near his sword, ready to defend his ship and his wife, but Pegge is at home in the milling crowd, squatting next to the burnt cat to calm it while the men ease the horse cart through the mass of people and goods on the wharf. She must have paid the wharfinger in advance, for he attaches his hook to the bundled statue at once, lowering it with jerking motions into the barge. As the effigy settlers into the stern William feels the full weight of his father-in-law John Donne, who has been dead for more than thirty years.

The fractions in the relationship between Donne and his daughter are reflected in the narrative. There are some odd jolts and jumps between narrators. The dead Ann More gives her views on the elderly Donne's over concern for his clerical reputation, and Donne too narrates part of his earlier, pre-Pegge, life. Like the jolts in the relationship between Pegge and Donne, these narrative jolts do not matter, instead they serve to accentuate the liquid flow of words from Pegge's point-of-view. Pegge's passions and values are real and to be admired, Donne's evasiveness and Anne's sacrifice (on the triple altar of Donne's political career, his religious feelings, and his passion) are not to be aspired to, it is their early heritage and her father's poetry that Pegge cherishes.

So does the flavour of metaphysical poetry translate to the novel? I think this the most successful aspect of an otherwise excellent work:

On the hard benches in Paul's choir, the children mastered the art of daydreaming, of aping the role of listeners. They lounged about in their minds while their bodies knelt, skewered by their father's roving gaze. The boys looked into the crumbling vault and took aim at pigeons with imaginary cross bows. The girls dreamt of amassing dowries to free themselves from their father's sway.

But Pegge listened. She could hear the bodies decomposing under her feet in the privacy of tombs. Her hearing was acute, able to pick out threads of silence, like the sub-human sounds of worms extruding casts or like the silent descenders in a printer's font.

Throughout Conceit the metaphysical motifs are there, delicately so, in every aspect of the book: the concepts of heaven and hell, "The greater Heaven in an Heaven less" or "Things greater are in less contain'd", human passion, the perfection of the deity in the natural world, ideas of landscape and exploration, the unlikely muse of worm or flea, and most of all there is a delight in language, in paradox, in metaphor, in conceit.

I think Novik's combination of fluid prose, warm characterisation and sweet literary word play are extremely successful. It is not a book that is plot driven, we simply watch Pegge come to terms with her own character. I love Novik's John Donne and I love her London. I hated coming to the end and I know it will become a regular re-read.

The fabulous Conceit by Mary Novik is going into my top ten books of the last ten years.

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Also reviewed by:

The Overdecorated Bookcase : "Novik's novel ... snaps the very bones of expectation"

Book giveaway

As I mentioned previously Conceit is not currently published in the UK. Unbelievably. I have a signed, first edition hardback of the Canadian publication to give away to a UK blogger. (Sorry non-UK readers I try to offer worldwide draws but I'd like this book to get a chance on another UK blog). If you would like to enter, you're are usually resident in the UK and you have a book blog please just leave message in the comments section saying that you want to enter, before midnight UK time on Wednesday 11th May. I'll do the draw and announce the winner the following day. Please leave a link to your blog too unless you know I know you have a blog.

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How to buy a copy of Conceit if you're not in Canada:

So how do you get a copy? Well there are a few secondhand on Biblio and of course you can get it from Amazon.ca. The link for that is over in the right hand column fully emblazoned with all the Amazon regalia to remind you you are buying in Canadian dollars and will incur international shipping charges (unless you're Canadian of course).

Comments

[BookElfLeeds]

Hello, I would love love love a copy of this book. It sounds amazing, I love John Donne. I write on a blog with a couple of other readers in my book club and it would therefore be passed around rather than hoarded!Please enter me into this competition. Thank you :)

[Silvia]

This competition is pretty special! Thanks for a chance to win :o)

[GeraniumCat]

Reading your post persuaded me that this is a book I want to read, so I was disappointed to learn that it's not available here (and I'm being very firm with myself and not buying books from Canada, at the moment, despite temptations). So you can probably guess, I'd love to enter the giveaway, please!

[Cornflower]

That does sound good.

[Teresa]

Well, you pretty well sold me on this one when you told me about it last week, and now I'm even more convinced that I'd like it. Of course, I can't enter your giveaway, being in the US, but I'll be wishlisting it at my book-swapping sites and hoping for the best.

[Alis Hawkins]

Phew, just got in in time. I'd love to be entered for the draw, Catherine - this book sounds absolutely wonderful. Thanks!

[Juxtabook]

Thanks for your comments folks. Alis- actually i was thinking of you and your writing a lot when I read this.

[Tracey]

Hi, please enter me for the draw, I do write about books on my blog, although not exclusively

[Jim Bartley]

Here's my review of the wonderful Conceit. (Appeared originally in The Globe and Mail, print edition.)

CONCEIT
by Mary Novik
Doubleday Canada
416 pages

reviewed by Jim Bartley

This novel is so engaging, so plenteous, that I have an unstoppable urge to talk about myself first. Having also published a novel, I have the expected high opinion of it. Mary Novik’s has wrung my ermine stole of vanity to a hair shirt.

Bookish types speak of conceit as something more than personal vanity; it’s also a writerly thing, a device employed by novelists and poets that can exhibit the same kind of preening self-regard, or in the best cases play licence to brilliant excess, stretching metaphor into strands of gossamer.

Conceit among writers is eternal, but as a literary device it’s currently about as common as the quill pen. Quills (waiting in the well, poised in the hand) once encouraged the mental space for conceits to play in. Now computers never give the neural pathways a rest. Mary Novik has made an end-run around her technology. I pictured ink-stained fingers, candlelight, sheaves of manuscript.

is a mind-expanding creation of a distant world (17th century England) in often exhilarating detail: seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted. No stale costume drama or heaving bodice-ripper, the book refuses to press familiar buttons. Novik’s imagination leaps from ecstatic to hellish. It snuffles around in recesses of the mind, rooting for things dark and delectable.

Poet John Donne was a compulsive conceit practitioner, perhaps most famously in his poem in which a man argues to his unattainable beloved that a flea is their Cupid, sucking and commingling their blood and thereby consummating their love. Is there anything left to lose, he asks, by enjoying the traditional fluid exchange? If this seems a puerile seductive ploy, it confirms that conceit is a precarious business, dividing literary camps, slipping easily into absurdity.

Novik walks the tightrope with audacity and assurance. Her late-summer London comes to us ablaze with the great fire of 1666, a flash-forward seen through the eyes of diarist Samuel Pepys. Donne has been dead 35 years. His daughter, Pegge, is set on rescuing her father’s marble effigy from St Paul’s. With two hired men and a horsecart, she enters the massive cathedral, its roof timbers already aflame. Working in “the harrowing light,” they pry the statue from its niche as molten roofing lead begins to cascade into the church. Hugging the stone walls, they watch the roof vaulting collapse and break through the stone floor. Pegge stares into the crypt, where her father’s corpse is now buried beneath blazing timbers.

Fade to childhood. Donne is Dean of St Pauls. Widowed five years and still bitter with grief, he browbeats his parishioners and five daughters with what essentially are death threats: mortality, contingent always on sin, underpins every moment. Bitten by a flea while carving the dinner joint, Donne is off once again on “the dangers of minuscule things. Pins and combs and pulled hairs could gangrene and kill... men could laugh themselves to death.”

At 11, Pegge has her sights set on “young idler” Izaak Walton. Izaak is mooning over Pegge’s older sister, recently betrothed to another. With seduction in the air, Novik takes us back into St Paul’s, 40 years’ pre-conflagration, intact if badly crumbling. This is the massive medieval church, not Wren’s genteel Baroque replacement. City streets and vaulted sanctuary are a lively continuum. As Donne preaches, tradesmen shortcutting from Cheapside to the wharfs “wheel sides of beef through the transepts.” In the churchyard, Blackfriars actors pace and declaim.

After her prescribed devotions, Pegge observes her sister flirting cruelly with the smitten Izaak. Later she tails him out to a desolate fishing spot by the river where she goads him with talk of “unrequited love.” When he throws rocks at her, her response is a threat to marry him. “I know more than you think, for I have read my father’s poem about his mistress.” Bolting from this pubescent siren, Izaak cracks his head on a tree branch and drops into the mud — a chance to dazedly submit to her care. Novik directs (and paces, and costumes, and lights) this scene with wonderful skill and wit. It’s full of raw desire framed in November grays and redolent decay — and hope of erotic redemption.

We shift to the ghostly view of Donne’s deceased wife, Ann, recalling her first encounters with John as her Spanish instructor. Their frequent sparring is born of infatuation. John pronounces Ann “ethereal”, belonging “out of time.” At one lesson she sees the word “conjugation” scrawled in the grime of the windowpane. She senses it has nothing to do with Spanish verbs. “Words spilled from his lips into the bedchamber of my ear. I fell in love with John Donne’s words, darting like swallows in and out of the frippery of this world, no more belonging to it than birds belonged inside a house.”

Quoting can’t express the fullness of this writing. Novik can take a symbol (say, a fish eye) and in a sentence or two make it awaken and integrate thematic nuances that have slept in the reader’s subconscious for chapters. Reading is like settling into a multi-course feast that shifts your ideas of food — of the wonders that art can conjure from the staples of life.

In one of the book’s inspired tweaks of history, John’s death is witnessed solely by the teenaged Pegge. The carnal, the mortal and the mystical dance in fascinating counterpoint in Novik’s death of Donne. Years later, as Pegge and her husband shelter Izaak Walton at their country estate after the loss of his house in the great fire, she blurts out her judgements of his two celebrated (historical) works, one on fly fishing, the other a life of Donne. she calls “lovely,” while Izaak’s first-person account of her father’s death is dismissed as a hagiographic sham. Izaak was not even present for the death. “You painted him with a white brush... made a plaster saint of him.”

Ultimately, Pegge’s heart belongs to daddy. How she expresses it, months after his death, amid the charred ruins of London, is Novik’s apotheosis of the macabre.
If this all seems a bit rarified, it’s my lapse. Buy the book. Find a free weekend and a quiet place. Do not Google. Step away from the remote. Enter London, 1666: the blaze of death and life. Recall what it means to know a world through the surface of a page: created in the words of a gifted stranger, made uniquely yours by your own storehouse of experience and the mystery of your subconscious. will cut a reviving swath through your tech-addled world.