Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words

 

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words  2020

This fascinating book by the Australian novelist, Pip Williams, is a tour de force in the sense that she has managed to write an entire book about creating a dictionary without once becoming a pedantic bore.  It is a feminist tract without question. On the other hand, it is surrounded by a compelling and imaginative story of a woman who has become conscious in the late 19^th century that dictionaries have always been written by men and as a result many of the words used by or about women have been relegated to the dustbin or given negative meanings.

Esme, the heroine, has grown up in the Scriptorium, a drafty potting shed,  where a corps of scholars are assembling  The OED or (The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language.)  Initially, she is a child whose mother has died, crawling about beneath a sorting table and beginning to collect stray slips carrying words or definitions that have been discarded or carelessly dropped. As she matures, she becomes one of the few female employees working on the dictionary and a conscious collector of words dealing with women. Her maturation then encapsulates the thematic issues by integrating her story into the decline of the servant class and the rise of suffrage in England. 

Esme literally worship words-- their meanings, their derivations, and discussions of why certain words survive in print and others do not. She says: “Words are our tools of resurrections.”  It’s how you bring things back.   We won’t stop speaking them if they aren’t in the dictionary.”

The deep hurt and longing experienced by women of all classes is one of the stronger features of the book and it is nowhere communicated  so poignantly as when Esme’s life-long servant, Lizzie, says:  “I guess I like to keep my hands busy. . . . it proves I exist. . . .” I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned—at the end of the day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.”

Esme and Lizzie are afforded plenty of pragmatic experiences that highlight the task before them. Some of them are triumphant and some sad, but in total it makes one last quote from the book stand out to me. “We can’t always make the choices we’d like, but we can try to make the best of what we must settle for.”

Read this for its message, its inventive story, for the people it brings alive, or for your love of language, but do put it on your reading list.   

Jim De Young,  July, 2022

 

 

A Banquet of Consequences

 

A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George  

 

Ms. George,  in this once again far too long novel, sets up a tragic family situation in which a young man’s suicide triggers a series of sordid, unimaginable horrors from the past. One problem is that the characters in this family from hell seem so perverted, twisted, unsavory, and sex driven that I could not help thinking that the world would be a better place if they were all eliminated instead of just one of them.

Even though this is billed as a Lynley novel, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley is stuck  with doing minor London legwork and dealing with the always impatient upper echelon as represented by Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery.  The real main characters are DS Barbara Havers and DS Winston Ngata who move and shake the plot  in the Dorset countryside where most of the real action occurs. Both of them are as different from Lynley as night and day, but his absence as a driving force may disappoint some readers.

The plot is, as usual in detective novels, complex, is full of twists right down to the last pages. Ms. George has done her research on poison and Agatha Christie would be proud of her. What excites me less is that there are a few too many coincidences driving the story. This starts with Barbara Havers accidental contact in London with the murder victim and her entourage and then the assignment of the case to Lynley's team. The discovery of records hidden in the boot of the murdered woman’s car, that surely would have been searched long before Barbara finds them, is another example.  She also finds them because of some strange procedural decisions.  Why are Barbara and Winston staying in the murder victim's home for instance?  And how could it be reasonable for Barbara to use the victim’s car to go to an interview?  To top it off she then finds a valuable document trove in the boot when the car has a convenient flat tire.  In another lucky discovery, she finds a third tract on a tape recorder by accidently pressing a button rather than through knowledgeable detection.  

Although by the ending all the characters appear to have reaped their full “Banquet of Consequences,”  there is a kind of sordidness about the whole affair.  “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” says one character and this family is clearly right at death’s door.  

Jim De Young  7/9/22

Wildlife Out In Force This AM

A pleasant sunny morning was amenable to see one of our deer and the big old turkey from our balcony at Grant Living at Indian Creek.