Novel of the week Cal Revely-Calder
Novel, noun: “a small tale, generally of love”. (So Dr Johnson said.) Eley Williams’s fiction is all about love, but its style is shy and abashed. Attrib. and Other
Stories (2017) was a collection of inventive tales that would swerve into language games – puns, definitions, wit – whenever their lovestruck narrators began to blush. Now comes her first novel, The Liar’s Dictionary, a pair of love stories, in parallel, about two bibliomaniacs.
Peter Winceworth is a late-Victorian clerk; Mallory is a female intern in the present day. Both are in love with women around whom both, in lieu of being frank, tend to toy with the foibles of the English language instead. And both are employed by the same book, Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. But while Winceworth works in the glory days, Mallory is digitising the volumes alone for a posterity that doesn’t care.
The chapters are named after the alphabet – P is for “phantom”, Q is for “queer” – and gently they converge, as Mallory learns of Winceworth’s secret act. His crime: to insert “mountweazels”, words he invented on the spot. They’re “briefer than an anecdote, more overworked than a passing thought”. His motives, at first, are obscure. Mallory must weed the mountweazels out, while fielding anonymous homophobic bomb threats.
The whydunit strand is nifty: there’s a twist that I didn’t expect. But the pleasures are linguistic. There are numerous digressions into words and their afterlives. Coleridge, we hear, came up with “bisexual”, and “grawlix” is the name for “£*%!” – swearing in cartoonese. It’s fascinating, if slightly overdone.
But the emotional weft is exquisite. Echoes in language, both verbal and body, pass between eras with subtlety. The
Liar’s Dictionary is a dexterous handling of two mysteries at once: a malfeasance, which ends up solved, and the problem of love, which does not.