Lexicography and mountweazels
Free-spirited young British writer’s The Liar’s Dictionary, gives a lexicographical insight, with rich language and her characters rounded enough to be sympathetic but clever and funny, intoxicated with joy and as vivid as Dickens.
Eley Williams explores themes of trust and creativity.
The novel also interleaves two stories, set in 1899 and the present day respectively, the first involves around Peter Winceworth, a disaffected Victorian shy lexicographer, employed by the fictional Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, an endeavor begun in the late 19th century but largely abandoned after most of its employees are killed in the first world war, inserts false entries into a dictionary in an attempt to assert some sense of individual purpose and artistic freedom. In the present day, narrated by Mallory, a young overworked and underpaid intern of a five years’ standing at Swansby’s band its sole employee besides the editor-in-chief David Swansbym a descendant of the dictionary’s founder, who has decided the great work should finally be published in the online form. Mallory is tasked with uncovering these entries before the work is digitized. Winceworth imagines who will find his fictional words in an unknown future and Mallory discovers all of Winceworth’s unauthorized montweazels, she becomes increasingly obsessed with her work and uncovers more about the anonymous lexicographer’s life through the clues left in his fictitious entries, both discover how they might negotiate the convolutions of an absurd inexorable, deceitful hoax-spread undefinable life. Winceworth’s routine life and everyday faith in the utility of language are toppled when he falls in love with a colleague’s fiancé. A tumultuous day involving an impromptu romantic lunch and a freak gas explosion prompt Winceworth to smuggle his own linguistic inventions into the dictionary. Mountweazel n, the phenomenon of false entries within dictionaries and works of reference often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement.
The novel explores the rigidity, fragility, and absurdity of language.
The novel is a collection of tales ranging from a description of the dating challenges of synaesthesia sufferer to an account of the companionship between a rat trained to sniff out explosives and his affectionate keeper.
Mallory’s job entails entering data into a terminally slow outdated computer and fielding anonymous phone calls from a man threatening to blow up the building.
What connects two protagonists beyond their passion for finding the right words to describe the things they see and feel is the anxiety of social interactions that borders on dysfunctional.
There is a chapter in which Winceworth, anxiously determined to avoid conversation at all costs, drunkenly ramble through a party by tracing out the shapes of the letter, is a comic tour de force. The explanation of a run-in with an ailing pelican is meticulously choreographed.
The character of a Frasham, a raffish field-man whose real job at the dictionary is to fund its research by extracting cash from his wealthy friends.
Williams’s ability to tease the extraordinary from the ordinary with her playful, and smartening warm prose makes her one of the best emerging young British writers of modern times.
The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams, Heinemann £14.99, 288 pages.