Winceworth had returned to vexing over why no word had been coined for the specific type of headache he was suffering. The bitter meanness of its fillip, the sludgy electric sense of guilt coupled with its existence as physical retribution for time spent in one’s cups. A certain lack of memory, as if pain was crowding it out. You drink too much and this headache was the result – the world was surely in the market for such an affliction to bear a name? [p. 50]
From 'A is for artful (adj.)' to 'Z is for zugzwang (n.)', this is a novel for lexicophiles: for people (like me) who, reading it, would use the Kindle dictionary lookup (with varying degrees of success) for agrupt, forbs, grawlix, leucocholy, peltee, smeuse, zarf ... and would be charmed, rather than vexed, by the existence of mountweazels. Can a dictionary be taken seriously if it contains made-up words? This question exercises Mallory and Winceworth, both small cogs in the great machine that is Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, infamously incomplete and -- in Mallory's time, more or less contemporary London -- due to be digitised by David, last scion of the Swansby dynasty. Mallory's chapters alternate with those of Winceworth, a menial lexicographer in 1899: when we first meet him, he's wondering why there is no word for an alcohol-induced headache. ('The modern use of hangover and morning after as having anything to do with alcohol only cropped up in 1919,' explains Mallory helpfully.)
Both Mallory and Winceworth hold secrets: Mallory has a girlfriend, Pip, but is not out at work; Winceworth has affected a lisp since childhood, and is undergoing company-mandated speech therapy, deemed necessary now that he is working on words beginning with 'S'. Both are prone to distraction. And both are threatened by terrible, literal explosions. There are also a lot of birds (including a pelican in St James' Park) and a number of cats, all named Titivillus after a demon of typology, all nicknamed, regrettably, 'Tits'.
The plots are not the primary charm of this novel, for me, though they're surprisingly, unpredictably interesting. What I found joy in was the playfulness of the prose: the non-sequiturs, the increasingly baroque digressions, the mountweazels that grant Winceworth a kind of immortality and give Mallory (ably assisted by Pip) a real sense of purpose for a change. It is not all lighthearted. Winceworth discovers some ugly behaviour and a woman who is not what he thought she was: Mallory and Pip have a constant non-argument about Mallory's inability to acknowledge their relationship. But words, here, matter, and the metaphor of the inaccurate and incomplete dictionary illustrates a variety of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, wilful and otherwise.
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