The Invention of Dr Cake

By Andrew Motion

Book Overview

Dr Cake is an unexceptional man. After a period of study and practice in London and several years spent travelling in Europe, he has chosen the life of a village doctor and lives quietly and alone.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571216323
• ISBN13: 9780571216321
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 142 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A brilliant and intriguig novella

This short novel is based on a report written by a doctor called William Tabor who sets off to meet Dr John Cake in Halstead near Woodham, shortly before the latter's death on 17 August 1844. Dr Cake is a frail man suffering from tuberculosis but his intellectual strength is still intact. Both men's passion is poetry and the conversation unfolds around great poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly or Keats. But it is when Dr Cake expresses some doubts about Keats's death that the two men start reflecting on the afterlife of poets. What if Keats had decided to stage his own disappearance and continued to live under another identity? Strangely enough, like Keats, Dr Cake was born in 1795, went to school near London, started working as a doctor and then gave it up to devote himself to poetry. And why was Dr Cake buried with no name on the brass plate screwed on his coffin-lid? Perhaps "Dr Cake" is an invention after all...