Faking it further.(Book Review)

The Invention of Dr Cake, by Andrew Motion; Faber & Faber, 2003, $17.95.

BIOGRAPHY? Gothic melodrama? Metafiction? Nowhere does Andrew Motion's The Invention of Dr Cake disclose its genre. What is clear, however, is that his latest, slim book is written in the same spirit as his partly fabricated biography of Thomas Griffiths Wanewright, one of the most quicksilver characters in the circle around John Keats. But whereas Wainewright the Poisoner (2000) capitalised on the currency of biography itself, the obeisance it pays to document and fact, The Invention of Dr Cake fakes it further: it is an elaborate and speculative game in the subjunctive mode.

What if the consumptive John Keats hadn't died young in Rome; what if his first poems hadn't been savaged in Blackwood's Magazine; what if he had returned to England and assumed a new identity; what if he had returned to his calling and become a provincial medical practitioner like George Eliot's Lydgate? Motion (who has also written a thoroughly orthodox biography of Keats) writes in the conviction that biography tells us everything except what is really important to know about a life.

Much of the book (of which Motion presents himself as genteel editor) is given over to the memoirs of Dr William Tabor (1802-50), a Finchley doctor and sometime poet, and his meetings with a kindred spirit, the Dr Cake of the title (1795-1844), who has latterly been in practice in northern Essex and now, desperately ill, is being cared for by his Irish housekeeper, Mrs Reilly. John Cake is in the terminal stages of consumption. Within half an hour of meeting him, Dr Tabor fancies the pale man facing him must be more than a provincial medical practitioner. He notices the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare, "the Presider", hanging on the wall, the shelves crammed with books and relics of an earlier life of travel.

He mentions the Lake poets and the Cockney School, and Cake becomes edgy. As he slips into melancholy reminiscence, Cake's retelling of his life makes it seem uncannily similar to that of Keats: born in 1795, studied at Guy's, worked as dresser to the great surgeon Astley Cooper (a common misbelief tricked into the narrative by Motion to puncture the illusion of editorial omniscience). Soon Tabor is convinced Cake is Keats: "Such was the doctor's power: to suggest by the merest phrase something magical in the world and in himself." Cake has a secret, and he wants Tabor to keep it safe.

The book's period style announces a mystery. From the first chapter, when Tabor recollects the circumstances of Cake's funeral, and is startled by the blank nameplate on the coffin, something gothic--a bit of ...