THE LIAR’S DICTIONARY

ELEY WILLIAMS

Heinemann, 288pp, £14.99

The Liar’s Dictionary is a first novel from a writer who received huge praise and prizes for Attrib. and Other Stories, a finely crafted linguistically playful collection of shorts. The novel has two story strands, which converge – one concerns a Pooterish lexicographer working on the ‘S’ section of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary in 1899 who is emboldened by love into inserting new words of his own invention. The second strand concerns Mallory, an intern at Swansby’s a century later, who has been given the job of rooting out the fake entries – known as mountweazels. She thinks about the writer in the past, he thinks about the future reader. Mallory has a girlfriend and mixed feelings about coming out.

Alexandra Harris in the Guardian described this as a ‘not-quite-plot strand’ and hailed ‘a warm, intricate novel shaped by a powerfully humane and uncoercive intelligence…a book of big ideas in a minor key’. Stuart Kelly in the Spectator confessed to cantering through the book and welcoming its ‘distraction during lockdown’, but also acknowledged ‘enough hidden jokes and cunningly disguised rabbit holes to make one want to return to it’. He described it as a novel of ‘lists, alliterations, allusions, swirling meditations on language, dictionaries, gender, puns, linguistic jokes… even the author’s own neologisms’. But Dr Johnson’s definition of the novel, ‘a small tale, generally of love’, is never lost sight of by Williams, who ‘deals with love as something which cannot be put into words, and dare not speak its name (done neither stridently nor sentimentally). It is, in short, a delight.’ Jay Gilbert in the Literary Review praised Williams as ‘an assured and satisfying writer, her language rich and intricate and her characters rounded enough to be sympathetic and lampoonish enough to be terribly funny. Her writing owes something to Wodehouse but more to Waugh in his most amusing of disgruntled humours.’