A palely loitering revenant

‘Reviewers,’ laments the Dr Cake of Andrew Motion’s title, ‘they are devils. Devils. I have seen good men, good authors, broken by their deprecations. The worst of it is their presumption in supposing that those they chastise do not know their own faults, and admonish themselves with a ferocity others can only imagine.’ From a Laureate whose (admittedly rotten) recent poems have been kicked gleefully to death in the public prints, this has the ring of something profoundly felt. There’s a later, rueful allusion to the superiority of the young Wordsworth over the old Wordsworth – ‘the Laureate who now preaches at us’.

There is another reason to be wary of approaching this novel as a reviewer: how to do so without giving away the central surprise in the plot? It steals up on you – and on the narrator – so unexpectedly, and so delightingly, that . . . well, I’m sorry, I’ve thought about it, and I’m afraid there simply isn’t a way to write about The Invention of Dr Cake without giving it away.