By Eley Williams
Penguin/Random House, 288 pages.
★★
I love words and The Liar’s Dictionary, the debut novel from Britain’s Eley Williams is all about them. I should have adored it, but I found it a big concept delivered by a small vehicle.
First, though, credit to Ms. Williams for possessing a fearfully large vocabulary. She needed one to tackle this book. It takes place inside the offices of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary in London, and weaves two stories 100 years apart. Think of Swansby’s as an also-ran to multi-volume works such as the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s, or Chambers. In short, Swansby’s is an obscure effort with big pretensions. Lexicographers tend to be serious people who do exacting work and Swansby’s was once a beehive filled with those distilling the definition, etymology, and changing uses of words. It’s a daunting task; English has over 470,00 words, which is why words are dropped to make way for more au courant terms for the one-volume dictionary that doubles as a doorstop.
In 1899, Peter Winceworth is at work on the “S” volume. He’s exactly as you’d imagine a caricature of a word-obsessed worker drone lexicographer to be. He’s an oddball loner, loves the word pons–part of the brain stem–and fakes a lisp to avoid as much human contact as possible. That’s not a bad strategy considering that some of the staff at Swansby’s make him look normal. Office head Dr. Rochfort-Smith is an autocrat, Terence Frasham a bloviator secure in his high opinion of himself, Ronald Glossop shadows Frasham and hounds Winceworth, Sophia Slivkovna might or might not be Russian, and there are two Miss Cottinghams–one with black hair and one with white. There have been a series of office cats, all nicknamed “Tits,” short for Titivillus, the Satanic demon that leads scribes make mistakes. More on that in a moment. There are also some untoward things going on at Swansby’s, many of which would set afire the hair of proper Victorians. Peter is unwittingly and unwillingly drawn into some of these, but mostly he’s a meek individual drawn toward passive-aggressive ways to cope with disdain and boredom.
A hundred years later, Mallory secures an internship from David Swansby, a descendant of the dictionary’s founder. She mainly needs a job, though she does love words, and I’ll bet you know which is her favorite. She surely wouldn’t need to be a mathematician to determine that she and David are the only two people in the office, nor does she require upper-level accounting skills to conclude that Swansby’s financial model makes no sense. Her three major duties are to be a David’s beck and call, handle obscene rants from a disgruntled reader, and digitize Swansby’s based on the 1899 publication. She soon discovers a series of mountweazels–deliberately introduced errors–and sets about the task of discovering who introduced invented words into the dictionary. Among the delicious mountweazels is mendaciloquence, defined as the smell of a donkey burning. To close the novel’s circle, there are a few sordid things about the modern Swansby’s and parallel dangers.
The Liar’s Dictionary is about words, mystery, debauchery, coming out, and staying afloat. Some of it is very funny and you will probably find yourself challenged to determine which words are mountweazels and which are simply hopelessly obscure terms that only Latin lovers or anal retentives could love. Such quirkiness has led some to compare Williams to Nabokov, but to use a big word of my own, those making such leaps suffer from apophenia, a tendency to see patterns and connections in unrelated things. (It’s also an indication of schizophrenia!) At times it’s hard to know whether the vocabulary Williams uses sets the table for erudite Victorianism, is a form of showing off, or misdirection to hide the raggedness of the novel’s structure and story arcs.
Why, for example, are terms randomly bolded (presumably italicized in the print editions)? If they referenced defined terms, that would be one thing, but there’s no real consistency to how they appear. It’s as if I defined bafflegab as a gibberish that is designed to confuse you. There are so many on a page that they made me queasy, as if I were suffering a black and white version of the photosensitivity induced by fast-paced Japanese anime features. Your enjoyment of the novel depends upon how many unknown big words you can stomach in a single reading experience and how well your eyes adjust to the breaks in visual continuity. Perhaps some will find all of this clever, but to interject a bit of Scots, for me it was one big whigmaleerie–a fanciful contrivance.
Rob Weir
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