The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams review – big ideas in a minor key
Eley Williams won prizes and delighted readers with Attrib. and Other Stories (2017), a collection in which dazzled celebrations of love were inseparable from a head-over-heels courtship of language. The letters of the alphabet were stroked and tickled into life; the epigraph was Samuel Johnson’s wistful dictionary entry for Trolmydames: “Of this word I know not the meaning.” In fact trolmydames is the ballgame ninepins, but in the evolving games of her own writing Williams prefers to keep conclusive definitions on hold. Now her first novel offers further adventures in love and language, taking us deep into the world of lexicography and asking: can a dictionary lie? Would the addition of a little fiction to an authoritative work of reference be a desecration or the making of it?
There are two alternating and converging stories. Peter Winceworth is working on the “S” section of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary in 1899. Ignored, taken for granted, suddenly but unrequitedly in love, he is a consciously unheroic figure quietly resigned to his lot – except for a small kindling of rebellion that emboldens him to insert new words of his own devising. Mallory is an intern at Swansby’s a century later, tasked with rooting out aberrant entries that seem to have crept in. She imagines the person who might have made up these words; he imagines the reader who will one day find them.
Fake entries, or mountweazels, have often been used by compilers of reference works as a way to check for breaches of copyright: a plagiarist will unknowingly repeat the errors along with the rest. To Williams this is not merely an intriguing curiosity, but a testing ground for the notion of authority and its relation to our partial, creative, eccentric selves. Invented words are her way into those ever-fertile debates about how far language should be fixed or constantly remade. “Surely compiling a dictionary,” muses Mallory, is “like conceiving of a sieve for stars”. As the image suggests, she is romantic about words: longing to catch them, humbly awed by their power to spin free. She and Peter are hard-working logophiles who devote themselves to ordering the language inherited from others – but that’s precisely why they appreciate the power of occasional subversion. It’s why they care about coining words to match their own as-yet-undefined experiences.
If the dictionary is analogous to a cathedral made by hundreds of anonymous workers, the personal additions are like out-of-the-way gargoyles idiosyncratically carved in defiance of the pattern book. Or like the rebelliously off-script sounds made by the Foley artist in Attrib. and Other Stories, who was meant to record innocuous birdsong to accompany “The Creation of Eve” on a gallery audio-guide but made a spirited intervention. Peter’s neologisms in The Liar’s Dictionary constitute a kind of self-portrait; Swansby’s incorrect and unfinished dictionary is an “unreliable narrator” of the lives of its creators. As for Mallory, who can tell you the pH levels of the words she meets, their “consistency, texture, taste, colour, odour, network, milieu, stance, poise”, she is aware of language both liberating and worrying her. She “learned a new syllabus” from dictionaries as a girl, encountering and side-stepping words such as “dyke”, “gay”, “queer”. Now she’s digitising an updated entry for “marriage”. Whose language is this? “Well, I’m the dictionary today”, says Mallory’s partner Pip, answering the office phone.
Mallory has been with Pip for five years but hasn’t told her parents and isn’t about to tell her boss. One of the novel’s many not-quite-plot strands is concerned with her mixed feelings about coming out. Rococo configurations of language and perception wreathe around themselves until a sudden moment of clarity catches Mallory unawares and it turns out that “Yes” is the word she wants. We might think of the woman in Williams’s story “Smote” who spends many pages articulating her inability to kiss her partner in an art gallery before the partner happily kisses her. In Williams’s writing, the simple words and actions don’t invalidate or override the hesitant, sidelong or circumlocutory ones: she is keen to make room for them all.
She includes, too, a gallimaufry of influences and tribute tracks: to Ali Smith, to Evelyn Waugh, to My Fair Lady. She swaps the obsessive quests in the “Ash Factory” of AS Byatt’s Possession for slip-ups and daydreams in Swansby’s scrivenery (or “dovecote” or “grotto” or “ossuary”). Though she’s interested in light touches and flickers, Williams has a taste for the joke squeezed until it yields its most absurdist juices. She rejoices in whole clowders of cats called Titivillus (“Tits?” “Tits!”), a mock battle with a choking pelican, much spilt Pelikan ink, a femme fatale behind a pot plant and an almost-orgy. Hers is a warm, intricate novel shaped by a powerfully humane and uncoercive intelligence. It’s a book of big ideas in a minor key. Sceptical about grand visions, it is also resistant to conclusion, so that perhaps the best kind of readerly tribute is to say: “Of this novel I know not the meaning.”
• The Liar’s Dictionary is published by William Heinemann (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
