Conceit [Import] [Paperback]

Mary Novik (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0385662068 | ISBN-13: 978-0385662062 | Publication Date: July 29, 2008

"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 from three directions. Built of massive stones, the cathedral is held to be invincible, but suddenly Pegge sees what the flames covet: the two hundred and fifty feet of scaffolding erected around the broken tower. Once the flames have a foothold on the wooden scaffolds, they can jump to the lead roof, and once the timbers burn and the vaulting cracks, the cathedral will be toppled by its own mass, a royal bear brought down by common dogs." (p.9)

It is the Great Fire of 1666. The imposing edifice of St. Paul's Cathedral, a landmark of London since the twelfth century, is being reduced to rubble by the flames that engulf the City.

In the holocaust, Pegge and a small group of men struggle to save the effigy of her father, John Donne, famous love poet and the great Dean of St. Paul's. Making their way through the heat and confusion of the streets, they arrive at Paul's wharf. Pegge's husband, William Bowles, anxiously scans the wretched scene, suddenly realizing why Pegge has asked him to meet her at this desperate spot.

The story behind this dramatic rescue begins forty years before the fire. Pegge Donne is still a rebellious girl, already too clever for a world that values learning only in men, when her father begins arranging marriages for his five daughters, including Pegge. Pegge, however, is desperate to taste the all-consuming desire that led to her parents' clandestine marriage, notorious throughout England for shattering social convention and for inspiring some of the most erotic and profound poetry ever written. She sets out to win the love of Izaak Walton, a man infatuated with her older sister.

Stung by Walton's rejection and jealous of her physically mature sisters, the boyish Pegge becomes convinced that it is her own father who knows the secret of love. She collects his poems, hoping to piece together her parents' history, searching for some connection to the mother she barely knew.

Intertwined with Pegge's compelling voice are those of Ann More and John Donne, telling us of the courtship that inspired some of the world's greatest poetry of love and physical longing. Donne's seduction leads Ann to abandon social convention, risk her father's certain wrath, and elope with Donne. It is the undoing of his career and the two are left to struggle in a marriage that leads to her death in her twelfth childbirth at age thirty-three.

In Donne's final days, Pegge tries, in ways that push the boundaries of daughterly behaviour, to discover the key to unlock her own sexuality. After his death, Pegge still struggles to free herself from an obsession that threatens to drive her beyond the bounds of reason. Even after she marries, she cannot suppress her independence or her desire to experience extraordinary love.

Conceit brings to life the teeming, bawdy streets of London, the intrigue-ridden court, and the lushness of the seventeenth-century English countryside. It is a story of many kinds of love — erotic, familial, unrequited, and obsessive — and the unpredictable workings of the human heart. With characters plucked from the pages of history, Mary Novik's debut novel is an elegant, fully-imagined story of lives you will find hard to leave behind.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A powerful and passionate historical story vividly set in 17th-century England. . . . Fans of novels like A.S. Byatt's Possession and Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring will enjoy Novik's perspective on one of the great figures of English literature."
—Vancouver Sun

"A magnificent novel of seventeenth-century London. . . . Conceit is a mind-expanding creation of a distant world in often-exhilarating detail, seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted. . . . Reading Conceit 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. . . . 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. . . . Conceit will cut a reviving swath through your tech-addled world."
—The Globe and Mail

"[An] extraordinary debut novel. . . . As delightful as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and as erudite and readable as A.S. Byatt’s Possession."
—Quill and Quire, starred review

"A hearty, boiling stew of a novel, served up in rich old-fashioned story-telling. Novik lures her readers into the streets of a bawdy seventeenth-century London with a nudge and a wink and keeps them there with her infectious love of detail and character. A raunchy, hugely entertaining read that will leave you at once satiated and hungry for more."
—Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of The Cure for Death by Lightning

"A gorgeous, startling, deeply moving novel. . . . A feast, a pageant, a seduction of words."
—Thomas Wharton, author of Icefields

"A vivid and sensuous tale set in the world where passion and death are never far apart."
—Eva Stachniak, author of Garden of Venus

"Read Conceit not for its foods and flowers and silks and seductions — though these are here in all their lusty Elizabethan richness — but for its prose. . . . Novik’s writing couples the sacred and the sexy as neatly as Donne’s own."
—Annabel Lyon, author of Oxygen

"I loved Conceit, the fully formed characters, the wonderfully evoked historical setting, but above all the passion that informs the narrative throughout. . . . A glorious exploration of the human heart."
—Béa Gonzalez, author of The Mapmaker's Opera

"I’m reading a brilliant historical novel, Conceit, by Canadian Mary Novik, mostly about John Donne’s daughter. From one jury: 'Like Girl With a Pearl Earring, Conceit is a vivid and intelligent novel with a complex female character at its heart.' Her prose reminds me of Year of Wonders. I’m blown away."
—Sandra Gulland, author of Mistress of the Sun


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Called "a magnificent novel of seventeenth-century London" by The Globe and Mail, Conceit has been warmly received by book clubs and was chosen as a Book of the Year by both Quill & Quire and The Globe and Mail. It was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller, won The Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was called one of the "top ten hottest new Canadian books" of 2008 by AbeBooks.

Mary Novik was raised in a large family in Victoria, British Columbia and has been passionate about books all her life. She was inspired to write Conceit when she was visiting St. Paul's Cathedral in London and discovered that John Donne's effigy was the only monument that survived the Great Fire of 1666. That night, Mary had a dream in which his daughter Pegge braved the holocaust to rescue her father's statue. Why? From that one question, Conceit began to unfold.

Mary lives in Vancouver, where she is writing a novel set in 14th-century Avignon.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Anchor Canada (July 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385662068
• ISBN-13: 978-0385662062
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,849,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mary Novik was raised in a large family in Victoria, British Columbia and has been passionate about books all her life. She was inspired to write her first novel, Conceit, when she was visiting St. Paul's Cathedral in London and discovered that John Donne's effigy was the only monument that survived the Great Fire of 1666. That night, Mary had a dream in which his daughter Pegge braved the holocaust to rescue her father's statue. Why? From that one question, Conceit began to unfold.

Called "a magnificent novel of seventeenth-century London" by The Globe and Mail, Conceit has been warmly received by book clubs and was chosen as a Book of the Year by both Quill & Quire and The Globe and Mail. It was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller, won The Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was called one of the "top ten hottest new Canadian books" of 2008 by AbeBooks.

Mary lives in Vancouver, where she is writing a novel set in 14th-century Avignon. She is on Twitter as MaryNovik2 and on Facebook as Mary Novik.

A 17th-century backgrounds page, reader's guide to Conceit, photos, news & events, and a blog may be found at Mary's website, http://www.marynovik.com She welcomes visitors and hopes they will leave comments on her contact page.

A new interview with Mary Novik appears at The Book Addict's Guide to Good Books,
http://goodbooksguide.blogspot.com/2009/04/writing-life-mary-novik.html

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sorry I'm DONNE it!, November 24, 2007

By 

Cipriano "www.bookpuddle.blogspot.com" (Planet Claire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Conceit (Hardcover)

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 had written to his wife, notes that Donne "wrote love poems like a priest and holy poems like a lover." Not exactly the kind of stuff you'd leave as legacy to your offspring.

But legacy it becomes for Pegge, whose intelligent, independent voice relays much of the story, mingling her unflagging desire to find a love commensurate with her parents' all consuming passion with her own apparent failure to find a mate suitable to her desires. Pegge's early obsession with Izaak Walton, her father's biographer, forms an intriguing subnarrative enhancing the book's primary motifs.

Wanting to be remembered as a holy [and wholly] passionless man, after Ann dies in childbirth (their 12th), Donne denies the reality of the love they had shared...a love that had once compelled him to write of being buried with his love, entwined in an eternal embrace, as well as such heart-searing and ardent verse as "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."

Donne has not completely succumbed to the sacrosanct, however: we overhear the dying Donne privately recollect his youth and admit in straightforward interior monologues to Ann that he would "rather be owner of you one hour than all else ever." It is a desire that the pious Donne would like to destroy, but one that bespeaks the kind of absolute passion that daughter Pegge wants to find for her own life.

As Pegge follows her quest to discover "What is love?" - a question put to her ill and dying father in a most remarkable scene - Pegge, craving the kind of passion for which she knows (by reading Donne's poems to her mother) that her father and mother shared, ultimately becomes something of her mother's defender, a role that she sees as necessary largely because of Izaak Walton, whose Life of Donne seems to be an attempt to "sanctify" her father, erasing all his fleshly yearnings.

It is her insistence on seeing to it that both her father's lust and his longing for spiritual purity are represented in Walton's book that takes the book to its ending - and neatly (but not too neatly) wraps up Pegge's search.

Novik, though she draws her major characters completely, does not weaken on the minor roles either: emerging in full-fledged array are Izaak Walton - whose Compleat Angler forms a backdrop for passages on fish and fishing unlike any I have ever read- and the irrepressible Samuel Pepys, from whose Diary Novik draws to portray yet another (moving) look at how a marriage contends with the effects of unbridled passion - this time for someone other than one's spouse - a theme that, when closely examined, intensifies the book's central theme of passion vs. a less flesh-dependent love.
Opening the book with a vivid portrait of the Great Fire of London, a scene that is probably drawn from Pepys' account, Novik frames the narrative here: opening and closing with Pegge's rescue of her father's effigy from the inner sanctum of St. Paul's Cathedral. (Having more than a little fun with her historical perspective, Novik has even seen to have Christopher Wren make a timely cameo appearance.)

As close to being creative memoir with historical grounding as a novel can be, Novik's narrative in itself forms a kind of conceit as it offers both implied and overt comparisons between Donne's love in his youth and age and those of his daughter Pegge.
The conceit - an elaborate and ingenious analogy - was the literary device for which Donne is known. Donne's brilliant use of this literary device runs smoothly through the book as Novik pulls in a radiant array of lines from his work. Novik's novel is scattered with lines from Donne's work, sometimes surreptitiously placed, sometimes quoted in full. They only add more richness to a book already rich in descriptive, sensuous prose describing domestic activities, city life in London in the seventeenth century and natural settings.

As with any complex work of literature, it is impossible to fit Conceit into any kind of neat slot. It is fiction, it is biography, it is history.
But mostly it is a story of the conflicts found within us all - the longing for ....the higher and yet the yoked to physical and earthly pleasures.
No pretty little romantic story, Conceit can be a disquieting read on many levels, not the least being that - not to give too much away - Novik hints in several instances of what most would view as an unnatural, unhealthy love.
But it is the language and the questions it asks that ultimately may leave the reader with his [or her] own obsession - to read more of the poetry of Donne.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical fiction at its best, January 7, 2010

By 

Imogen (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Conceit (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars superbly discreet, October 27, 2007

By 

John D. S. Camfield (vancouver, british columbia canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Conceit (Hardcover)

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.