“I need to talk to you about mountweazels.”
“Mountweazels,” I repeated.
“There are mistakes. In the dictionary,” he said. There seemed to be a sob edging the softness of his voice. I stared at him. He assumed a defensive tone. “Well. Not mistakes. Notquite mistakes. They’re words that are meant to be there but not meant to be there.”
“Mountweazels,” I repeated again.
“Other dictionaries have them! Most!” David Swansby said. “They’re made-up words.”
“All words are made up,” I said.
“That is true,” David Swansby replied, “and also not a useful contribution.”
I found The Liar’s Dictionary to be a fun romp through time and language; examining how we assign meaning to words and meaning to life. Author Eley Williams is obviously in love with the English language, and although that made for some nice moments for a word-nerd like myself, Williams also seems in love with the sound of her own voice, and sometimes, the narrative drifted off into meaningless overindulgence for me. The plot here is pretty thin, the characters (and especially the background men) are even thinner, and if this is meant to be social commentary about the history of finding meaning in your work or acceptance of your sexuality, it’s certainly not deep. But it was fun — I had never heard of mountweazels before and I found Williams’ use of them as a narrative device to be fresh and interesting — and I’m happy to have read this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Winceworth slipped the blue index cards into the deck on his desk. His mouth was dry. A private rebellion, a lie without a victim — what claims for truth did anyone really have? What right to define a world? Some trace of his thoughts surviving him was not so bad a thing. He would live for ever.
The plot rotates between two POVs: In Victorian London, Peter Winceworth was a young lexicographer, tasked with assembling words and their definitions for an English dictionary (at a time when many such efforts were underway to be the first to publication), and as he felt invisible at work amongst his fellow scriveners, and as he felt invisible in life (until he met the intriguing Sophia Slivkovna), he amused himself by making up words for feelings and situations that he felt ought to have names. In an act of “private rebellion”, he began to slip these nonwords into the official files of the Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.
In the present day, Mallory is a young intern who has been hired by the Swansby heir — the erect and elderly David Swansby — to help him to digitise what there is of his family’s famous dictionary (a reference book famous for having never been finished).
As well as answering calls, it was my job to check the spelling and punctuation of David’s updated words. This was laborious because David hated technology. Also, he had scrimped on buying office equipment. To use a computer in Swansby House was to hate the sight of an hourglass. The one on my computer’s loading screen was silent, monochrome and smaller than a fingernail, six black pixels in its top bulb and ten in the lower. I wondered how many months of people’s lives had been spent staring at this pinch-waisted little graphic popped up in the centre of this desktop. It made me think of the different tidemarks on the keyboard I inherited. Not quite grey, not quite black, not quite brown. Of what: skin? Grime? The word slough came to mind. The word sebum. The record of previous hands resting on this very same piece of plastic. Some of them might have died and this little scuff mark could be the only trace of them left on this earth. In short: this keyboard made me feel a little sick.
David eventually discovers that there are these made-up words in the dictionary, and as Mallory is further tasked with tracking them down, there’s a nice correspondence between the words she uncovers in the present and the situations that we see Winceworth go through in the past (slivkovnion (n.) a daydream, briefly could break your heart; asinidorose (n.), to emit the smell of a burning donkey is rather brilliant in its subtlety). And while I did like, that as a word lover, Winceworth would mull over fascinating vocabulary (abecedarian, smeuse, or widdershins), the following is an example of what I found simply excessive:
He wondered whether anyone would miss him if he just stayed put amongst the weeds, kicking the clocks of dandelions until facelessness and spending the afternoon not amongst paper and letters and words but instead here, head to and in and of the clouds counting birds until the numbers ran out. There were funny, oily little wild birds in the park, some of which he recognised. Starlings with feathers star-spangled and glittersome. One brave bird hopped about his feet for cake crumbs while still more were flitting above his head with the dandelion seeds, blown wishes finding a smeuse in the air. The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show — the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the birds 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.
(And on the other hand, as silly as it was, I laughed at loud at the scene with the pelican that came next.) Everything about the phone calls — beginning to end — annoyed me, I didn’t find authenticity in the relationship between Mallory and Pip (five years working around the corner from each other and Pip never once dropped by Mallory’s office before?), and the ending of Winceworth’s storyline was telegraphed from nearly the beginning: despite the cleverness of the mountweazels (which weren’t actually mountweazels) speaking across time, the plot for The Liar’s Dictionary really didn’t work for me. Yet still, I had fun with it; no regrets that I picked this up.
And as someone who named one of her daughters "Mallory", I was mildly amused by the following:
She asked my name and checked the correct spelling, ‘Like the mountaineer?’David listened intently to my response and I wondered whether he harboured theories about my first name, its provenance or meaning. He seemed like the kind of person to have opinions about names. If I was descended from someone called Gerolf, I would too. In the past I’ve been asked whether I was named after the vain, uppity character who doesn’t kiss Michael J. Fox in the TV series Family Ties (1982–89). I’ve been asked whether I was named after the psychotic wife who does kiss Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers (1994). People’s minds run, misspellingly, to those Enid Blyton books with their Towers and their jolly hockey sticks (1946–1951) or further back to writers of Arthurian legend. Handsome male lieutenants lost on mountainsides (1924) was a new one, however. What these people must think of my parents, I don’t know. Some books say that Mallory comes from the Old French, meaning the unlucky one. If that’s the case, what I think of my parents, I don’t want to know.
I don't think that the name is that uncommon — and, yes, we did know that it be translated as "the unlucky one" — but I do want to point out that in Family Ties, Mallory was Michael J. Fox's sister, so why would she kiss him? Weird observation.
