Conceit

by Mary Novik

Book Overview

"St Paul's cathedral stands like a cornered beast on Ludgate hill, taking deep breaths above the smoke. The fire has made terrifying progress in the night and is closing in on the ancient monument... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038566205X
• ISBN13: 9780385662055
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Doubleday Canada
• Length: 402 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Historical fiction at its best

Mary Novik has written a seventeenth-century historical fiction, at the heart of which is Pegge Donne, one of the poet John Donne's daughters. Significant characters are her poet-priest father, her mother Ann More Donne, her siblings and children, some contemporary luminaries and other persons, and her husband Sir William Bowles. The gist is two generations of the Donnes' domestic lives-- courtship, marriage, childbirth, and dying--amid the backdrop of contemporary English events. Novik's style is sensuous with description yet also raises longing, love, and letters to a spiritual plane. The transition between above and below ground, between this life and the next, is celebrated rather than shunned: Ann Donne opines from under the paved stones of St. Clements; bones and effigies are returned to the life cycle, memories and remnants haunt present generations. Passages, sometimes resemble a prose poem. Highly recommended for literary and history buffs, this book differs in style and theme from Edward Docx's modern fiction THE CALLIGRAPHER, an adaptation of Donne's thirty SONGS AND SONNETS.

Gorgeous

This is a beautifully-written historical novel, told mainly from the point-of-view of John Donne's daughter. This is the type of historical fiction I delight in, with flawlessly crafted prose, delightful details, wit, and interesting family dynamics. I highly recommend it.

Sorry I'm DONNE it!

Forget your high-school textbook anthologies! Mary Novik's Conceit is nothing like that! Hers is a brilliant and complex work featuring a sparkling cast of characters who step off the page as breathing - yea, sometimes panting. A flawed, and sometimes tormented panoply of human beings. Donne, whose literary fame rests on both his theological meditations and poetry and his earlier sensuous Cavalier lyrics both to Ann More and to his reputed mistresses (pre-Ann) forms the cog of the wheel of this narrative. This poet's extremes, as any student of 17th century English literary study knows, is the core of the Donne dichotomy. For to say you like John Donne is to be met with the question: Which Donne? The Cavalier - who loved all he touched, or the enigmatic, untouchable Priest, whose writing reflected a man grappling with Puritan concepts of the evils of the flesh and a preoccupation with the subject of death? Who was this man, so passionate in his love for Ann More that he risked everything to make her his wife only to later occupy high moral ground of the Anglican pulpit where - in sanctimonious tones - he decried his own sinful passion and her "voluptuous spirit"? Was this pious priest the same lover who, thrown into jail for his union with her, wrote despairingly (and characteristically wittily) to her from prison the now famous phrase "John Donne. Ann Donne. Undone." The question not only of Love's secret but also the poet's identity is at the center of this page turner of a novel; and if that were Novik's only focus, it would be question enough, indeed, to explore. But - in something of a conceit itself, alongside Donne's life story, deepening and complicating the answer to the riddle, is Novik's largely fanciful story of Donne's youngest daughter, Pegge and her own quest for love. A quest that would seem to drive her toward madness of the kind found in the pages of gothic fiction. Novik leans Pegge's longing and incisive memory narrative against the narrative voices of Donne (who wanders through the past and looks to the future as he waits to die and rise to a purified state), and Ann, whose haunting voice escapes from the grave to harry both John and Pegge to tell her story - the real story of the "undone" lovers. It is a request that Pegge seems to hear and to take on as her challenge. Though there is ample bawdy here as Novik takes us in rich description to the beds of the book's lovers, Conceit is no mere Harlequin romance telling in titillating tones the story of the famous and erotically charged lovelife of Ann More and John Donne. A rich display of creative nonfiction, the book rambles leisurely into Novik's impressions (meticulously researched) of an historical London and its tapestries of plague, medicine (maggots, poultices of dead pigeons, etc.), fashion, politics, and personalities. Novik, who said that she got the idea for the novel while wondering what Donne's children would think of the steamy letters and poems that he ha

superbly discreet

This is a superbly discreet novel about Pegge Donne, a daughter of John Donne. It is a wonderful portrait in which the figure of John Donne also looms large in a setting believably evoked through well researched, unobtrusive detail. The main ideas are, as one would expect, concerned with physical presences in a world where spiritual truths are imaginative possibilities rather than realities. For me, the spiritual climax of the work has been brought off with great skill considering its brave entangling of sex with death in a scene of revelatory beauty well fitting the metaphysical aura of the entire novel (see Chapter 18 "A Nocturnal"). Perhaps it is that i love novels in which the dead speak. The language of the novel is exemplary; several times a paragraph struck me as among the best i'd ever read. Obviously John Donne has inspired the author to a representation that is convincing. Since i've a great interest in film i've spent some time since reading "Conceit" speculating on who i'd want to play the various roles; Pegge & John Donne would be plum roles & much could done with the scenes at St.Pauls burning during the Great Fire wherefrom Pegge retrieves the great effigy of her father. There is high drama at times but mostly it details Pegge's spiritual character & her relationships with her Father, Mother, Brothers, Sisters, Husband, & "friend" Isaac Walton. It is well worth reading. John Camfield, Vancouver B.C.