BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams review – a glorious way with words
Williams’s debut novel, a tale of two lexicographers, is a playful delight
Tue 14 July 2020
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The success of Attrib. had readers keenly awaiting this first novel, and it doesn’t disappoint. A virtuoso performance full of charm, it follows two lexicographers 100 years apart – Mallory, who narrates in the present, and Winceworth, shown in 1899. Both work for Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, a lesser-known rival to more illustrious reference works, and an eccentric labour of love maintained by generations of the Swansby family.
Mallory, whose previous job “paid £1.50 less per hour and involved standing by a conveyor belt and turning un-iced gingerbread men by 30 degrees”, is an intern in her 20s, brought in to digitise the dictionary, which it turns out is seeded with invented words. Her eccentric boss, David, tasks her with investigating the errors. There’s another mystery: someone is calling the office issuing bomb threats on account of the dictionary changing its 1899 definition of marriage from “union between man and woman” to “between … persons”.
Williams cuts between Mallory and Winceworth in alphabetical chapters named after various mountweazels (the made-up words inserted into dictionaries to protect their intellectual property). Winceworth’s very name seems to suggest his intense awkwardness. Having faked a lisp to garner sympathy, he’s forced to maintain the charade of attending elocution lessons ordered by his boss. His segments of the novel concern his longing for a woman who’s already spoken for, encountered on a clubland shindig held to raise funds for the fledgling dictionary.
There’s great skill in how the novel remains compact and focused while delivering satisfaction on multiple levels. It’s simultaneously a love story, an office comedy, a sleuth mystery and a slice of gaslit late Victoriana. As Mallory’s girlfriend, Pip, or “flatmate” as she describes her in public, turns from cameo to central player as the mystery unravels, the tender depiction of a same-sex relationship built on a shared fondness for etymological fooling around recalls the early stories of Ali Smith, whose intellectually curious, free-range spirit Williams shares. And while it’s far from laboured, the novel underlines the difficulty of getting by as a graduate in London.
There’s some gentle friction around the subject of Mallory’s desire to keep her sexuality private. When she thinks back to the furtive thrill of thumbing through a school dictionary looking up words about genitals, or when she and Pip discover the lesbian feminism of Monique Wittig, or when Winceworth’s frustrations at his romantic disappointment and loathing of his colleagues turns to professional mischief, Williams keeps in sight big questions about language and identity. But as in Attrib., there’s nothing arid about these investigations; this is a novel full of fun. Williams writes with fine comic timing, in prose glinting with goodies. Mallory tells us: “Some words are made for speculative onomatopoeia. Did I spell onomatopoeia correctly first time of typing ever since college? Did I fuck. Onomatoepia is onomatopoeia for mashing your hands unthinkingly but hopefully on a keyboard.”
Throughout, you feel in the safe hands of a storyteller dedicating their talent to our pleasure. The Liar’s Dictionary is a glorious novel – a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us.
• The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams is published by William Heinemann (£14.99).
THE GUARDIAN
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