Review of THE LIAR'S DICTIONARY by Eley Williams (New Release)

 3 Stars

This novel is for readers who enjoy wordplay.  I love words and etymology but the absence of an interesting plot and engaging characters makes this book tedious after a while. 

There are two parallel stories.  One is set in 1899; Peter Winceworth is a lexicographer working on the multi-volume Swansby’s Encyclopedic Dictionary.  As a small act of rebellion, he begins to insert fictitious entries (known as mountweazels).  In the present, Mallory, an intern for the same publisher, is tasked with uncovering these mountweazels before the dictionary is digitized.  She also has to contend with threatening phone calls from an anonymous caller upset at the updated definition of “marriage."  Both narratives also have a romance element.  Winceworth falls in love with a woman already engaged to a colleague.  Mallory is in love with Pip, and though they live together, Mallory has not told anyone that she is gay. 

I connected with neither Winceworth nor Mallory.  Though the former is a bit more developed, Mallory remains vague and insubstantial.  Both are milquetoasts, afraid to speak up.  Winceworth even “concocted, affected and perfected a fake speech impediment” because he was bored, thought it made him more endearing, and “made people respond to him with a greater gentleness.”  Then he is upset when people make fun of his lisp!?  Mallory seems to have no idea what she wants in life and claims she loves Pip but is afraid to speak out and acknowledge that love.  After a while, I just got bored with them.

In terms of plot, not much really happens.  What does happen seems contrived.  Winceworth takes a train trip to Barking even though he knows he’s being set up and sent on a fool’s errand?  Of course the trip is just a plot device so Winceworth can witness an explosion and have an epiphany.  Just as an explosion serves as a catalyst for Mallory’s epiphany.  Other parallels between the two stories (the convenient but uninvited presence of the love interests at Swansby’s) also seem strained. 

The book begins very slowly.  The preface which expounds on the perfect dictionary, the perfect dictionary reader, and the perfect preface goes on and on, and were it not for the fact that I’d accepted an eARC in return for a review, I would have stopped reading when/if I got to the end.  Do we really need this list of words for “orange”:  “amber, apricot, auburn, Aurelian, brass, cantaloupe, carrot, cinnabar, citric, coccinate, copper, coral, embered, flammid, fulvous, gilt, ginger, Glenlivit-dear-god, hennaed, hessonite, honeyed, laharacish, marigold, marmaladled, mimolette, ochraceous, orangutan, oriele, paprikash, pumpkin, rubedinous, ruddy, rufulous, russet, rusty, saffron, sandy, sanguine, spessartite, tangerine, tawny, tigrine, topazine, Titian, vermilion, Votyak, xanthosiderite – “?  Do we need pages of discussion of hourglass iconography? 

Then there are the lengthy sentences that lose all meaning:  “The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show – the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the bird skeining against the grey clouds, hazing it and mazing it, a featherlight kaleidoscope noon-damp and knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’ paths, and wishful seeds, a bird-seed sky as something meddled and ripe and wish-hot, the breeze bird-breath soft like a – what – heart stopped in a lobby above one’s lungs as well it might, as might it will – seeds take a shape too soft to be called a burr, like falling asleep on a bench with the sun on your face, seeds in a shape too soft to be called a globe, too breakable to be a constellation, too tough to not be worth wishing upon, the crowd of birds, a unheard murmuration (pl.n.) not led by one bird but a cloud-folly of seeds, blasted by one of countless breaths escaping from blasted wished-upon clock as a breath, providing a clockwork with no regard to time nor hands, flocking with no purpose other than the clotting and thrilling and thrumming, a flock as gathered ellipses rather than lines of wing and bone and beak, falling asleep grey-headed rather than young and dazzling – more puff than flower – collecting the ellipses of empty speech bubbles, the words never said or sayable, former pauses in speech as busy as leaderless birds, twisting, blown apart softly, to warm and colour even the widest of skies.”  That’s one sentence!!

Being a logophile, I enjoyed adding to my vocabulary; for instance, I learned the meaning of bletted, jouissance, squib, ouroboros, cloacae, bleurgh, perfervid, smeuse, grawlix, zugzwang, cyprine, vuln, and netsuke.  I’ve found new words for my next Scrabble game and I’m looking forward to getting my next cup of take-out coffee and asking for a zarf.  And there is entertainment in reading about characters creating neologisms and trying to detect mountweazels.   Unfortunately, after a while, the book just becomes an exercise in cleverness.  It is linguistically extravagant but suffers from a paucity of strong narrative qualities.

Anyone interested in words and language will find much to enjoy, but anyone looking for a novel with compelling literary elements should look elsewhere.  Apparently, the author’s PhD thesis focused on “meeting points between lexicographical probity and creativity.”  This book certainly showcases her knowledge of lexicography but I’m less impressed with her creativity.

Note:  I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.