cover story | eley williams

A literary whodunit, a comedy of intentional errors, a paean to romance and rebellion—when talking about Eley Williams’ The Liar’s Dictionary, it’s hard to resist uttering a constellation of descriptors, thanks to the abundance of clever (delightful, inventive, loopy, memorable) words that pepper its pages.

In the mystery aspect of Williams’ entertaining tale, the Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is the case file, and mountweazels (made-up dictionary entries) are the crimes against vocabulary. The perpetrator of said crimes and the sleuth sniffing them out are separated by a century but bound together by their mutual employer, London’s Swansby House. And the potential victims? Well, that’s where reading the book— and learning a plethora of pleasurable words, genuine and fake—come in.

Williams speaks with BookPage as she walks her dog near her London home, where she lives with her wife, writer Nell Stevens. Williams explains that the inspiration for the novel came from acts of literary subterfuge that were born both of her studies—her Ph.D. research and thesis were about mountweazels—and the ways in which her own perspective on dictionaries and other arbiters of language has changed over time.

When she was a child, Williams explains, her parents “kept an illustrated Collins Dictionary by the dinner table. It seemed normal at the time, but it’s probably not good to have books surrounded by steam.” Potentially wrinkled pages aside, she says that for a long time, “I found comfort in pedantry and in saying no, that’s not what that word means; I can check. . . . That rigidity was a useful thing worth preserving.”

But as the years passed, her outlook on language became more fluid. “Words are deemed slang or dialect rather than proper English, but who is making that call?” she says. “What does that say about their political or ideological position? Now it’s more important to me to query that, to resist the idea of immutability.”

And so, in the hands of her character Peter Winceworth, mountweazels become tools of resistance. The year is 1899, and he works as a lexicographer in charge of the letter “S” for Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. One of many employees at the bustling Swansby House, he’s a reserved man prone to (and it seems, fond of) lying.

One of his longest deceptions: a lisp he affected as a child when he realized it “made people

respond to him with a greater gentleness.” Williams on her computer’s please-wait hourglass is grimly paints a spot-on portrait of an emotionally stunted humorous in its familiarity: “The iconography of man who is always at least a little bit enraged, the hourglass hinted at a particular progression: often hilariously so. His erudition makes for some that all natural things tend toward death. This impressively articulate internal rants about, say, a was not good for office morale.” too-loud bird or his boisterous co-workers. Betwixt and between hourglass-induced

While there’s a certain poetic justice in seeing distress, Mallory’s other primary duty is fielding Peter seethe at a situation created by his co-opting daily phone calls from a deranged-sounding a speech impairment for his own gain, it’s also man who issues bomb threats because he’s angry fascinating to bear witness as he embarks on that the definition of marriage is changing (to his next fabrication—or rather, series of fabri- include more than just a man and a woman). The cations, via mountweazels galore. He knows that calls are terrible and traumatic, and doubly so language “is something you accept or trust rather because Mallory is struggling with self-disclosure. than necessarily want to test out,” thus ensur- Her partner, the gregarious and loving Pip, has ing that made-up words like always been out, but Mallory “skipsty (v.), the act of taking steps two at a time” will be “Words are deemed isn’t ready just yet. Williams says that this published unnoticed because, after all, who would even think slang or dialect rather aspect of The Liar’s Dictionary drew on real-life events of inserting dishonesty into a than proper English, from when she was writing dictionary? It is important to note that but who is making the novel, particularly the backlash to certain dictionarmountweazels have often been deliberately employed that call?” ies making changes to their definition of marriage. This, by dictionary publishers as a she explains, raises “the idea creative means of protecting their copyright. of language as no longer a useful tool that rises The evocative term originated in the 1975 New from society, but rather something potentially Columbia Encyclopedia, which describes the constrictive and to do with didacticism, rather fictional Lillian Virginia Mountweazel as having than something changeable and mutable.” died “in an explosion while on assignment for Williams is far from alone in her desire to Combustibles magazine.” reexamine and challenge the status quo of soci-

But generally speaking, one presumably would etal monoliths, dictionaries or otherwise. After all, not expect a dictionary-house employee to simply she says, “The idea of an infallible dictionary make up words . . . unless that employee was can seem quite sinister, and not about what Peter, who is trapped in a life of unending frus- language can be, and is. There are enough tration, massive workloads and unrequited love. syllables in the world . . . for us to commu-

“So much of the novel is actually about the nicate while being supple with language, workplace and how one can feel valued or under- ambiguous rather than relying on fixity and valued or purposeless within a structure or archi- an ordained truth.” tecture that’s bigger than you,” Williams says. Under Williams’ guiding hand, much “The motif of the dictionary formed a correspon- is mutable in The Liar’s Dictionary, and dence with notions of labor and of boredom, and wonderfully so. The narrators’ parallel of value and self-worth.” secrets surge to the fore and shrink back,

Indeed, despite having never held an office job heightening their feelings of isolation and (“It was an entire fantasy!” she says with a laugh), honing their desire for genuine personal Williams truly captures the essence of office life— freedom. Comedic set pieces involving its moments of revelation and accomplishment, an unfortunate hard-boiled egg, drunken as well as its lack of privacy and enforced cama- perambulation and an agitated pelican raderie—both on the cusp of the 20th century are as memorable as they are deliciously and, as in the novel’s second timeline, in the 21st subversive (and in the case of the pelican, century, when sole Swansby’s employee Mallory just . . . astonishing). And there are more is tasked with digitizing the entire dictionary. secrets in this book than those—ones that

Mallory works under the supervision of inexorably lead our heroes to a conclusion 70-year-old David, a descendant of the Victorian- that is exciting and gratifying in the realms era Swansbys, who is determined to create a new of both vocation and vocabulary. company legacy. Mallory’s assignment sounds On the whole, The Liar’s Dictionary is a straightforward enough, if a bit of a slog, but there smart, funny, passionate exploration of how is an unfortunate catch. Her mission will not be language can serve, challenge or define us. complete until she has found and eradicated all of the mountweazels from the dictionary, while The Liar’s Dictionary tracking her work on what she believes to be the Doubleday, $26 .95, 9780385546775 world’s slowest computer. Like Peter’s irritated ravings, Mallory’s restless internal perseveration Comic Fiction It’s also a testament to the power of speaking up and using our voices, whether on the page, in our own heads or out loud.

Fans of Williams’ acclaimed Attrib. and Other Stories have been looking forward to this novel, which she wrote while working as a lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She’s also a fellow of England’s Royal Society of Literature where, she jokes, “We all have a go at sitting on the throne.”

Alas, there are no literal thrones—but she does get to be “a part of literary culture” in England. “The best bit is,” she says, “when you’re inducted, you get to sign your name in a big book, and you get to choose a pen. The pens on offer—one belonged to Byron, another to George Eliot, I think another was T.S. Eliot, and they’d just stopped using the one from Charles Dickens. You do have that moment a bit like Mallory and Winceworth, where it’s just an object, just a thing, but you’ve invested so much in notions of literary worth and value, and you’re just enthralled by it and have that moment of connection.”

At this point in our chat, Williams and her dog, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Bryher, prepare to hurry on home. Of her dog, Williams insists, “You must say, ‘She’s so athletic and dedicated!’”

Done and done. —Linda M. Castellitto