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The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

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The Dictionary of Lost Words: Amazon.co.uk: Williams, Pip: 9780593160190: Books

I go to my village book group because I enjoy discussing books and getting to know people. I don’t particularly expect to enjoy the novels. It leans much more modern than my taste, and often towards the sort of historical fiction or issue-driven novel that are relatively well written and not (to me) at all interesting. They probably won’t be remembered in a decade’s time, and they’re often written in a very similar style.

Well, I’m more than happy to say that The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) by Pip Williams is a pleasant exception to my rule. Yes, it’s historical fiction. Yes, it’s new(ish). And to be honest, yes, it probably isn’t going to enter any sort of canon – but I really enjoyed it. All 400+ pages of it, and we all know how I feel about books over 300 pages.

It helps that Williams is writing about a world I have known well. As the book opens, Esme is the daughter of a widowed man who works on the embryonic Oxford English Dictionary. He works under Dr James Murray, sorting slips of paper with quotations illustrating words. Each of these slips, stored in specially designed shelves in the Scriptorium, will contribute to evidence of how a word is used. Eventually, of course, every single word will be included in Murray’s ambitious OED.

The reason this is familiar to me is that I used to work for Oxford Dictionaries. I was in the marketing department, running a now-sadly-deleted blog about language, but we were all steeped in the lore of Murray and the origins of the dictionary. Williams has clearly researched all of this well, and I understand that one of my ex-colleagues was a consultant on the novel, making sure that it is a broadly accurate depiction of the early days of the dictionary.

But this is not a work of non-fiction, and so of course a lot is invented – not least Esme herself. As a young child, she is fascinated by what her dad is doing. The slips of paper have a special lure for her – and she can’t help but take one slip, for ‘bondmaid’, when it falls onto the floor. Bondmaid was, indeed, a word missing from the first edition of the OED. Williams’ suggested reason is fanciful, but I enjoyed the possibility.

It was a word, and it slipped off the end of the table. When it lands, I thought, I’ll rescue it, and hand it to Dr Murray myself.

I watched it. For a thousand moments I watched it ride some unseen current of air. I expect it to land on the unswept floor, but it didn’t. It glided like a bird, almost landing, then rose up to somersault as if bidden by a genie. I never imagined that it might land in my lap, that it could possibly travel so far. But it did.

[…]

I held the word up to the light. Black ink on white paper. Eight letters; the first, a butterfly B. I moved my mouth around the rest as Da had taught me: O for orange, N for naughty, D for dog, M for Murray, A for apple, I for ink, D for dog, again. I sounded them out in a whisper. The first part was easy: bond. The second part took a little longer, but then I remembered how the A and I went together. Maid.

As Esme grows older, the dictionary remains a mainstay in her life – but she is also interested in the words that are not included. Quotations in the early OED are disproportionately drawn from books by men – partly, of course, that books were disproportionately written by men. They also often represent upper- and middle-class authors. Esme – living as close to the servants as she does to her societal ‘equals’ – becomes interested in the words that are used by women and by working-class women in particular. She convinces a servant to accompany her through Oxford’s Covered Market, listening to the words of stallholders, noting down what they say on her own set of slips. While spoken sentences don’t ‘count’ for the OED, she stores them in her own treasure chest. She compiles her own dictionary of lost words.

I enjoyed all this dictionary stuff because I am fascinated by the creation of the dictionary – and by language, and by words. But Williams knows that not all her readers will find this sufficiently interesting – and The Dictionary of Lost Words incorporates a great deal more. Being set around the turn of the 20th century and following Esme as she grows older, we see all manner of contemporary issues – particularly the suffrage movement, and later the First World War. At times it does feel like Williams is ticking off the key contemporary topics – Esme is mistreated at boarding school, visits wounded soldiers, she goes to suffragist events, she is a lens for Stopes-esque sexual discovery etc. etc. It all works well, but I do wonder if a novel a hundred pages shorter with slightly less incident would have been even better.

In Esme, Williams has created a sympathetic, intelligent, rounded character that it’s a pleasure to spend time with – particularly for any likeminded reader who shares her fascination with words. Some of Williams’ attempts to de-patriarchy the dictionary are far from treading new ground – I mean, I did an undergraduate thesis on the same topic – but there’s no denying that turning it into an engaging novel is likely to reach a much wider audience. There aren’t really any villains here either (bar one sniffy lexicographer who doesn’t want Esme near the Scriptorium) and it’s a refreshingly sincere, well-researched and often heart-rending look at a fascinating time in history.

Unnecessary Rankings! Jane Austen

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It’s actually surprising that it’s taken me this long to rank Jane Austen in my Unnecessary Rankings series. Because surely we’ve all had this conversation with fellow Austenites at some point?

It’s probably also the one that gets most controversial. But here we go…

8. Mansfield Park
It’s the novel that is most like her contemporaries’ novels, and it is comfortably the most boring. It’s too long and baggy, Fanny and Edmund scarcely scintillate, and it’s telling that nobody has managed to make a convincing adaptation for screen.

7. Collected Letters
Who knows what gems Cassandra burned, but beyond the few much-quoted bits from these letters, it’s all rather unrevealing and unexciting. And even the most quoted bits, like ‘two inches of ivory’, are clearly ironic and have often been used out of context.

6. Juvenilia / unfinished works
I’ve grouped all these together because I can’t really remember what I thought of Lady Susan vs The Watsons vs Sanditon vs Love and Freindship etc. Her early work shows an astonishing confidence at satire, and the unfinished works are fun without being fulfilling.

5. Persuasion
A lot of people put Persuasion at the top of their list, and there’s certainly a touching romance to the spinster-on-the-shelf Anne (who is all of 27) and the love she thought she’d lost forever. The reason it’s not very high on my list is that it’s her least funny book, in my opinion, and I read Austen at least as much for the humour as the character development.

4. Northanger Abbey
Austen’s lightest novel leans heavily on subverting stereotypes of the Gothic genre, but there’s a lot to enjoy even if we aren’t buried deep in the works of Ann Radcliffe. It’s silly, fresh, and surprisingly mentions baseball.

3. Emma
People who dislike Emma usually give the reason that she’s an annoying snob. Like, yes, that’s the point? And we love her nonetheless? The only one of Austen’s heroines who is independently wealthy, Emma is a fascinating study in being unobservant and delusional while also thinking she knows everyone deeply.

2. Sense and Sensibility
There’s a simple reason that I love Sense and Sensibility so much: it’s hilarious. Yes, I am moved by the story of Elinor and Marianne – but I come back to the book for Mr and Mrs Palmer.

1. Pride and Prejudice
There’s a reason it’s the most adapted one, and perhaps the story that comes to mind first when the average person thinks of Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennet is the perfect heroine, and her journey to self-knowledge is exquisite – and that’s before we get to the enormous number of incredible supporting characters. Austen doesn’t always get credit for the detail and brilliance of her plotting, and I think it’s best displayed in Pride and Prejudice.

Day by Michael Cunningham

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Cover image for Day by Micahel Cunningham

If you read my Top Books of 2023 or listened to the ‘Tea or Books?’ episode where Rachel and I shared our favourite reads, you’ll have already heard that I really loved Day by Michael Cunningham. It came out last year in N. America but has only just been released in the UK – so my review has gone live over at Shiny New Books.

Here’s a quote from the review – read the whole thing at Shiny New Books.

To the casual reader, Cunningham probably remains best-known for The Hours, with its three parallel storylines of Virginia Woolf writing Mrs Dalloway, a mid-century housewife reading Mrs Dalloway and a 1990s woman whose life very much resembles Mrs Dalloway’s. Day follows the theme of having a timespan in the title and taking place in three sections – though following the same group of 21st-century people. The first section takes place on the morning of 5 April, the middle section is the afternoon of 5 April, and the third section is the evening of 5 April. The twist on this idea is that the first part is 2019, the second is 2020, and the third is 2021. It’s the same day, but it is emphatically not the same day. This is, of course, Cunningham’s Covid novel.

Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul

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When I read R.B. Russell’s very good Fifty Forgotten Books, there were a handful of books that particularly appealed – and one of them was Phyllis Paul’s much-admired but out-of-print Twice Lost (1960), even though Russell actually prefers her A Little Treachery. I set up an abebooks alert and patiently waited – and, hurrah, finally a copy come up! It was quite pricey and not very good condition, but I didn’t think I’d ever stumble across another chance to read it.

…days after this tatty Lancer Gothic edition arrived, I saw the news that a beautiful new edition was being printed by McNally Editions! I do wonder if the bookseller had caught wind of the news and wanted to sell off this copy quick-sticks. NEVER MIND. I may not have the lovely edition, but I do have the fun of a copy that clearly mystified its editors/marketers. Because the way they’ve tried to sell it is really quite bafflingly unlike the book you’ll find inside. ‘An innocent schoolgirl is the victim of evil, and in terror the people of Hilberry ask why!’ sets up a very different sort of novel, and I suspect quite a few purchasers of this edition ended up confused and disappointed. For one thing, it gets the name of the village – Hilbery – wrong.

It’s clear from the outset that Phyllis Paul is not writing disposable mass-market fiction. Her writing is lush and beautiful, more like the opening of an Edwardian novel of manners than a gothic thriller. Here’s the opening paragraph:

They had separated and were creeping about the grass, bowed over, with their eyes on the ground. But it was too near nightfall. Through the gateway with the flanking piers topped by urns, whose pale, classic shapes were enveloped in savage tufts of ivy, the rest of the tennis-party had already drifted, and out in the lane voices rose boldly above the din of bicycle bells and hooters, and the stuttering of a motor-cycle on the point of moving off. Christine Gray and a friend of her own age, Penelope, had good-naturedly stayed behind to help the little girl in her search for a lost treasure.

The little girl is a curious, adventurous child called Vivian. Don’t worry about Penelope because we don’t see much of her, but Christine becomes a key figure – she is young herself, with the carelessness and trust of youth. It seems inconceivable that anything could truly go wrong. Not here, in a large, beautiful house in the English countryside at a party for well-off, cheerful people.

And yet – of course it does. Little Vivian goes missing. A search is made for her, or for the treasure she was hunting. No trace of her is left behind.

Twice Lost isn’t a procedural mystery by any stretch of the imagination, and the reader never feels like they are the trail of a detection. While we wait to see if a resolution will be given, it feels for much of the novel that Phyllis Paul isn’t especially interested in the disappearance herself. It’s the catalyst for a few things, and the story continues through to the end of the novel, but Paul is far more invested in writing about this small community in lovely, languorous prose. She is very good at it. There are many scenes where we can simply relax into the comedy and drama of human relationships – particularly between newcomers to the village, a writer Thomas Antequin and his son named, of all things, Keith. They have come to Carlotta House with the idea of Thomas Antequin becoming a renowned playwright, if he can do so away from all the distractions of town. Descriptions of Carlotta House are as near as Twice Lost gets to truly being Gothic, in my opinion. The section I noted down to quote is actually about a different house, a minor cottage, but it’s an example of the vivid, gorgeous writing that I so enjoy – and which must have come as such a surprise to readers hoping for the sort of novel suggested by this cover. It’s also a great insight into village life and the ways that small issues can become major. (You get the feeling these elms preoccupy villagers more than Vivian’s disappearance.)

But crouched at the foot of these majestic trees, on an uncultivated piece of ground as spacious as a meadow, was one small, ancient cottage; a little garden patch before it, and all the rest wild. Here, in fact, was an outstanding example of that obstructive cottage property which many a good, full, tidy mind in Hilbery lusted to sweep away. It was felt to be the nearest approach to a slum that the district possessed.

This lonely relic of wild beauty caused much unease in Hilbery Village. For the elms were ‘wild’! Efforts were therefore continually being made to prove that they were dangerous. Everyone knew that this cry of danger was a bare-faced pretext; the elms, if dangerous at all, were not remotely as dangerous as the near-by road since that had been straightened and turned into a speed-track, and there was no proposal to scrap that. And in fact, as always in such cases, all sorts of humane and public-spirited reasons had been put forward to mask a simple lust for destruction.

There was, of course, the opposite camp. The elms had their partisans. Even in Hilbery there were those whom wanton destruction enrages – and those who are perhaps even more enraged by the tidy mind. And among the first of these was the owner of the ground, a Mr. Parmore, who lived opposite in one of the rejuvenated farmhouses, and he was a man as determined as wealthy, and doted on his view. In the second class was the tenant of the cottage.

How many Lancer Gothic writers were putting in things like that? (It did slightly amuse me, in a sad kinda way, that this would be a moot conversation within a decade or two – when Dutch elm disease would have laid these trees to waste.)

We continue seeing the affectionate squabbling between Antequin senior and Anetquin junior – affectionate, but with an element of malice – as well as Christine’s development towards adulthood. Vivian is given up for lost, and people are sadder about the idea in the abstract than because anybody particularly valued poor Vivian as a person. Her stepmother certainly doesn’t mourn her. Her disappearance is chalked up as a freak accident.

Suddenly, turning from one chapter to the next and hardly heralded, we are a significant amount of time in the future. I don’t want to give away anything from this point (though the blurb to my edition does – and, to a certain extent, the title does too). But relationships have been formed, suspicions have developed, and Vivian’s disappearance continues to haunt Hilbery and its residents in ways that aren’t entirely obvious to the undiscerning.

I really enjoyed Twice Lost. It is a fascinating novel. For the most part, it is beautifully written and a piercing but undisturbing psychological portrait. Phyllis Paul sees her characters keenly, with the insight of a writer who doesn’t waste too much time on sympathy. But what also makes Twice Lost fascinating is how Paul seems to disregard many of the conventions of novelistic structure. It’s not even that she defies the rules of particular genres, or merges different genres together. There are parts that seem intentionally clumsy. There are significant characters and plot points hurriedly introduced in the final pages. The title only makes sense with enormous spoilers. There’s a lull in the momentum for the major part of the novel’s middle – that is fine, as a reader, because it’s so enjoyable to read – but it’s hard to imagine anybody advising on novelistic structure would let Vivian’s disappearance fade away for such a long stretch.

Only one of these strangenesses weakens the novel, in my opinion. The belatedly added characters feel like a cop out, and dent the sort of eerie elegance that the rest of Twice Lost has. For the rest – they just mark Paul out as an unusual novelist forging her own path. I can see why McNally republished this uncategorisable novel. One of the blurb quotes on my edition says, ‘A brilliant novel of suspense… haunting, fascinating, wonderful’. I don’t think it’s a novel of suspense – but I can’t disagree with the final three words.

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

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I don’t usually stand behind the idea that the books we read in school are ruined for us – but I have to admit that I have no long-lasting love for Of Mice and Men. It was rewarding to analyse for my GCSE English, but I filed it away in ‘worthy’ rather than ‘enjoyable’. It’s only recently that I’ve come to enjoy Steinbeck for his portrayal of small-town America. Last year I read Cannery Row, and now I’ve read The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

I suggested the book for my book group because I thought it would make sense to read it during winter… well, it turns out the title (while obviously a quotation from Richard III) is only working on one level. The novel starts on a ‘fair gold morning of April’, and Ethan and Mary Hawley are waking up together.

Ethan work in a grocer’s – though he used to own the shop. His family used to own a number of shops, in fact, and were well-respected people of note in their small community. Steinbeck doesn’t go into too much detail about the financial gambles that Ethan made, but they went horribly wrong. His business prospects were destroyed, and he has ended up at the bottom of the ladder again. He still has his loyal wife and his young, eager children – he is the sort of man who cannot be openly affectionate with any of them, but shows his love through parries and quips. Steinbeck is very good at the sort of light-hearted banter that men like Ethan exchange with their friends and dole out to their family (and very good also, later in the novel, at the confusion that children feel when this sort of father suddenly becomes serious).

The Hawleys seem to have a broadly happy marriage, and the badinage between them is elegantly done too. But Ethan clearly hasn’t come to terms with his fall from grace – and even patient Mary isn’t beyond outbursts of frustration:

“You said it! You started it. I’m not going to let you hide in your words. Do I love money? No, I don’t love money. But I don’t love worry either. I’d like to be able to hold up my head in this town. I don’t like the children to be hang-dog because they can’t dress as good – as well – as some others. I’d love to hold up my head.”

“And money would prop up your head?”

“It would wipe the sneers off the face of your hold la-de-las.”

“No one sneers at Hawley.”

“That’s what you think! You just don’t see it.”

“Maybe because I don’t look for it.”

“Are you throwing your holy Hawleys up at me?”

“No, my darling. It’s not much of a weapon any more.”

“Well, I’m glad you found it out. In this town or any other town a Hawley grocery clerk is still a grocery clerk.”

“Do you blame me for my failure?”

“No. Of course I don’t. But I do blame you for sitting wallowing in it. You could climb out of it if you didn’t have your old-fashioned fancy-pants ideas. Everybody’s laughing at you. A grand gentleman without money is a bum.” The word exploded in her head, and she was silent and ashamed.

I think the Hawleys’ state is an interesting contrast between mid-century America and mid-century Britain. I’m not a social historian, so have just picked this up from literature – but, in the UK, a ‘grand gentleman without money’ is still a grand gentleman. America doesn’t seem to have impoverished gentry in the same way – class in this community, at least, is determined by money and success. Now Ethan has lost it, he has lost his status.

Mary is a complex, sympathetic character – but Steinbeck is less generous to other women, particularly Margie. She seems a jack of many trades – telling fortunes being among the least disreputable. Ethan dislikes but largely tolerates her, and other men sleep with her when they’re out of other options. All of that is fine – Margie is a ‘type’ in a lot of mid-century novels of small-town America – but it is awkward and unpleasant to read narrative lines like ‘It was a durable face that had taken it and could it, even violence, even punching’. Steinbeck seems incapable of describing her without lingering on her breasts, and she is probably the least successful of his characters. Someone should have taken him aside and told him to grow up a bit.

I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that Margie and Mary have similar names. Together, one with supposed prophecy and one with hope, they think that Ethan has business success around the corner. Can he become content with his station in life, or will he try to change things? In the first half of the novel he is an exemplary portrait of a moral man. It wouldn’t be Steinbeck if things stayed that simple. And it wouldn’t be Steinbeck if he didn’t make some cynical comments about the state of the nation:

Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honourable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonourable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad.

What I most liked about Cannery Row was its depiction of small-town life that relied on many portraits of different men, women and children. The Winter of Our Discontent is much more about a single central character – the secondary characters are almost all very well-drawn and compelling to spend time with, but this is Ethan Hawley’s novel. Indeed, the narrative has some chapters in first-person and some in third-person, moving back and forth. I think I prefer Steinbeck when he turns his attention to a wider cast, but The Winter of Our Discontent is excellent. I haven’t detailed much of the plot, partly because its simplicity means that even a handful of hints will give too much of the game away – it is very predictable, I suspect deliberately so, but also very affecting because Ethan is known so intimately to us and we want to retain our respect for him.

This was Steinbeck’s final novel, and his talent was clearly undiminished. I haven’t attempted the novels on which his reputation is often considered to rest most firmly – East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath – but perhaps now I should.

The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning

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Ad for electronics, 1930s

When Scott (aka Furrowed Middlebrow) raves about a novel, you take notice. Katherine Dunning’s little-known 1934 novel was his favourite read of last year and he wrote extremely enthusiastically about it on his blog – and, even better, he made sure a copy was in my hands. Naturally, he was right. The Spring Begins is an exceptionally well-written and engaging novel. (There aren’t any dustjacket images around, so the above image from Flickr isn’t very relevant but amused me.)

There are three heroines to the novel, whose lives sometimes overlap but are largely kept secret. We go between their three narratives in turn – first is Lottie, a nurse-maid for the Kellaway family and their young children. Lottie is a child herself, and manages to retain some carefreeness while having few childlike freedoms. She is naïve and kind and keen, learning about the world while almost preternaturally aware of her place in its rigid hierarchies. Coming from an orphanage and intimidated by anybody in power (and men particularly), she is privileged to have raised even to her lowly position.

“Now, then…” Isobel clung to her, trying to suit her steps to Lottie’s. Out in the corridor Mr Kellaway was passing down. Lottie flattened herself against he wall. She must never be disrespectful, she must always stand still and make herself as small as possible when the master of the house went by.

But Isobel was his own flesh and blood. She could stand before him balancing herself with delicately sturdy legs right in his way.

“Hello, Daddy!”

He put out his hand and ruffled her head. “Hullo, Monkey!”

Next is Maggie, the scullery maid, a little older than Lottie. Scott describes her as ‘racy, sensual’ in his review and that is perfect. Where Lottie is scared of men, Maggie is intrigued and impetuous. She seems unperturbed by others’ opinions – if Lottie’s carefreeness comes from a love of nature and a spiritual alertness, Maggie’s comes from an unabashed earthiness. I will confess, of the three main characters, I found her the least interesting. I enjoyed her company, but Dunning is a very psychologically astute writer and I think Maggie gave her less material than the others.

Thirdly – how appropriate that she is last in my list, as in so many things – is Hessie. She is of the impoverished gentlewoman type, at an age where marriage is not impossible but is increasingly unlikely. She works as a sort of governess, emphatically not the servant class but also not fitting in anywhere else. Her only equals are her mother and sister Hilda (all live together) and she is desperate for an escape. Lottie’s sections are the most enjoyable to read, but I think the Hessie sections are the best. The early-20th-century spinster is a well-worn type, but Dunning mines her desperation, her frustration, her hopeless hopes with a brilliance that makes it feel fresh. Here she is, talking to her mother:

“I’ve got to go out, too. I promised Rosie Bates I’d call at her house this evening. She’s got a book…”

“What book, Hessie?”

“Oh, just a book.”

“Don’t read anything that isn’t nice, Hessie,” Mother said.

“Rosie said it was good.”

“Where did she get it – from the Young Women’s Library? Can you remember its title?”

Supposing she screamed now. Just dropped the plates and opened her mouth and screamed. Hessie bit her under lip as she ran out into the kitchen. She laid the plates with a clatter onto the draining-board by the sink, and pressed her hands to her head. How could she live through Hilda’s wedding, and afterwards, too? Evenings alone with Mother, while Hilda sat with her husband, and afterwards Hilda and Albert went upstairs together. Hilda would be a wife, a married woman. Hilda would come back to see them, and she’d talk about ‘my husband’ and Mother and she would exchange meaning glances, leaving Hessie outside the fraternity of married women.

I’ve spent a long time telling you about the main characters, because there isn’t really a lot of plot. The Spring Begins is really a portrait of these three lives – what drives them, what holds them back; what they understand and don’t yet understand. It is rare for novels of this period to consider the lower-classes in any depth, yet in this novel it is the upper-classes who pass by in the background. Dunning treats all three women as deeply realised people, worthy of novelistic respect even if they don’t get it from everyone around them.

Exquisitely drawn characters is one of the reasons that The Spring Begins is a masterpiece. The other is Dunning’s writing. Throughout the novel she writes about the world with sensitivity and beauty, perfectly judging the balance between poetic writing and readability. The reader is never tripped up by over-extended imagery or self-indulgent prose – it is striking in a way that makes us more appreciative of the possibilities of observation. Of course, I have to give an example:

The blue in the sky was deepening a little. It was a clear soft blue that started high up and went on and on, up and up until the sky looked like a lake of crystal blue air. There were no clouds anywhere. The fields and hedges had a young, refreshed appearance about them, still cloaked with the coolness of dew and protected by the softness of the early sunshine.

Ahead of them Mr Kellaway’s big car rolled along, very smoothly and silently. The children watched it eagerly, calling to Mr Andrew to hurry-hurry when it disappeared around a corner. It was agonising when they came to double bends in the road and the big car slid round the second bend before they were properly around the first.

By eleven o’clock the sun was shining strongly. They were travelling no main roads now, and the hedges looked dark beneath their covering of white dust, the fields parched and tired, the woods aloof as if hoarding their shade and silence and dignity for themselves alone. 

Illustration of a 1930 car

I’m so grateful to Scott to have had the chance to read this novel. I’m confident it will be among my favourite books of 2024. Sadly, it is currently extremely hard to find. I’ve already recommended it to the British Library Women Writers series – of course they’ll have to agree, and get the rights, but I have everything crossed that it’ll appear in the series one day. It’s a crime – an often-repeated crime, of course – that a writer as good as Dunning has been so neglected.

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

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When I was in Toronto, I met up with a listener to Tea or Books? – Debra – and, after a lovely dinner, we went book shopping. I told her I was on the lookout for Canadian authors writing about present-day Canada, and she had lots of great recommendations. Indeed, if I hadn’t already bought a lot of books in Vancouver, I’d probably have come home with a great deal more. One I couldn’t resist was Bellevue Square (2017) by Michael Redhill. (Sidenote: wouldn’t the cover be amazing if they hadn’t PRINTED on that sticker?) I now follow the cover designer, Jennifer Griffiths, on Instagram and really love her work.

The premise of Bellevue Square really appealed to me: Jean Mason discovers she has a doppelganger. She lives an ordinary life, working in a bookstore, husband and two sons, when regular visitors to the bookstore start to ask about the woman who looks exactly like her that they’ve seen in the neighbourhood. Indeed, they thought she was Jean.

Jean doesn’t see the woman herself, but becomes obsessed with discovering her. She even pays someone living in Bellevue Square Park to take photographs when they see this other woman, so she can keep track of her movements. (I believe Bellevue Square Park had an encampment of unhoused people in tents at the time of writing the novel.) She meets other people who know both women, such as someone in the food market selling pupusa. But then the people who know them both start dying.

If this sounds like I’ve given a lot away than, hoo boy, you’re in for a wild ride. I’m not going to say too much about the plot of Bellevue Square – but it’s certainly not the novel it seems going in. Indeed, it reinvents itself constantly. And the bit about people dying is revealed in a brilliant sentence on p.8:

I put the phone away and at that exact moment a woman I would later be accused of murdering walked into my shop. She wore a green dress embroidered with tiny mirrors and had warm, buttery skin.

Reading Bellevue Square felt a bit like watching the brilliant film The Father, which disorients the viewer over and over and over, giving a sense of what it is like to have dementia. Jean doesn’t have dementia, but the novel never leaves us on steady ground. Everything we think we know is repeatedly undermined, and even when you think the new piece of information has put you on more solid ground, the rug gets pulled from under you again.

What makes Redhill’s novel so masterful is that Bellevue Square feels so compelling and readable, even when you don’t have a clue what to believe. This sort of trickery could be irritating or confusing from another writer’s pen, but it is done so confidently that you always know you’re in safe hands. Wisely, he leans into clarity and simplicity in the prose – it often feels beautifully written, and is very sharp and funny in places, but he avoids anything overly elaborate. If the plot is a mystery to us, then let’s make sure the individual sentences aren’t. It also helps that the novel is anchored by Jean – her incisiveness, her determination, her wit, her occasional abrasiveness. She was a very compelling character.

I loved reading the novel – and it helped that I knew the streets that Jean was walking around from my visit last year. The moments of recognition were lovely.

I’m also fascinated by the cultural significance of doppelgangers. They come up time and again, from Dostoevsky’s The Double onwards (and probably before) – and every time people mention Shelley seeing his doppelganger shortly before he died. And, yes, it’s mentioned in Bellevue Square too. Readers seem captivated by the idea of encountering their doppelganger, and it is a phenomenon laden with eeriness and even menace. Reading a novel like Bellevue Square as an identical twin is quite an unusual experience. Because I have a doppelganger and have always had one – this spectre that is so eerie to most people is normal, everyday experience for me and for the other identical twins reading this book. So it’s interesting to see the experience from another side, used as the central plot point of a book. (I also think that most people, if they met their doppelganger, wouldn’t think it looked much like them. You know how photos never look like you-in-the-mirror? It’s like that having an identical twin.)

Let’s finish with a quote from early in the book that isn’t very relevant to the rest of the novel – but I love anything about arranging books:

But alphabetical is not the only order. I’m not a library, so I don’t have to go full-Dewey. A bookstore is a collection. It reflects someone’s taste. In the same way that curators decide what order you see the art in, I’m allowed to meddle with the browser’s logic, or even to please myself. Mix it up, see what happens. If you don’t like it, don’t shop here. January to June I alphabetize biographies by author. July to December: by subject.

There are moral issues involved, too. Should parenting books be displayed chronologically by year of publication? I don’t want to screw someone’s kid up by suggesting outdate parenting advice is on par with the new thinking. Aesthetic issues: should I arrange art books by height to avoid cover bleaching? Ethical: do dieting books belong near books about anorexia? And should I move books about confidence into the business section? And what is Self-Help? Is it anything like Self Storage (which is only for things, it turns out.) In Self-Help, I have found it is helpful not to read the books at all.

Tea or Books? #124: Our Favourite Reads of 2023

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Our favourite books from 2023 – or reads, because of course we mostly read ‘backlisted’ titles. Always a fun one to record – this time with the added bonus that we were each going to choose one from the other’s list to read for the next episode.

Some of our Patreon patrons also appear in this episode. You can join them, and get early access to episodes and other perks, at our Patreon. Do feel free to get in touch at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie
The World Between Two Covers by Ann Morgan
Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
Noble Ambitions by Adrian Tinniswood
The Long Weekend by Adrian Tinniswood
A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence
A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido
Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido
Noah’s Ark by Barbara Trapido
Barbara Comyns
Sex and Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido
The Travelling Hornplayer by Barbara Trapido
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll
Never Said A Word by Heinrich Böll
The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge
Dr Serocold by Helen Ashton
Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton
Yeoman’s Hospital by Helen Ashton
Half-Crown House by Helen Ashton
The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner
Katherine Anne Porter
This Little Art by Kate Briggs
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
Day by Michael Cunningham
Edith Holler by Edward Carey
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
Road Ends by Mary Lawson
For Every Favour by Ruby Ferguson
Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Jill’s Gymkhana by Ruby Ferguson
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale
Harriet Said… by Beryl Bainbridge
A Helping Hand by Celia Dale
The House By The Sea by May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
The Education of Harriett Hatfield by May Sarton
Landscape in Sunlight by Elizabeth Fair
A Winter Away by Elizabeth Fair
Barbara Pym
Jane Austen
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Native Heath by Elizabeth Fair
No Leading Lady by R.C. Sherriff
Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff
Old Filth by Jane Gardam
The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Last Friends by Jane Gardam
Dorothy Whippl

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming
To Serve Them All My Days by R.F. Delderfield
The Pillars of the House by Charlotte M. Yonge
The Q by Beth Brower
Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt
All the Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Armin
Mrs. Appleyard’s Year by Louise Andrews Kent
Pleasures and Palaces by Juliet Wilbor Tompkins
Albert’s Christmas by Alison Jezard
The Stillmeadow Road by Gladys Taber
Buttered Toast by Marjorie Stewart
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
An Unequal Music by Vikram Seth

The World Between Two Covers by Ann Morgan

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Every Christmas, I seem to read a book I was given for the previous Christmas. Partly that’s me looking at a particular book and thinking, “Gosh, I’ve wanted to read that for a whole year.” Partly it’s because I have time over Christmas to read anything I fancy, and so I grab a pile of books that look like fun. One of them this Christmas was Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe (2015), also published as Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer. I can’t imagine why the title was changed. Anyway, thanks for buying me this last year, Mum and Dad!

(I say I read this over Christmas – crucially, I finished it this year – so this will be the first link in my Century of Books.)

Ann Morgan runs a book blog to this day, but the title refers to the reading challenge she set herself in 2012: reading a book published by someone from every country in the world. That puts A Century of Books in perspective, doesn’t it? This was back in the peak of the book blogging phenomenon, and when any popular blog seemed to be given a book deal. Morgan’s book is fascinating, even if it doesn’t quite do what it says on the cover.

The World Between Two Covers does start with the genesis of the idea – which came from a comment on her blog. The first chapter is all about deciding to embark on the challenge, working out the list of countries (as you can imagine, not the easiest or most politically neutral task), and wondering if it were possible. Throughout the book we do occasionally get hints about the difficult parts of the challenge (how to get a book from a North Korean? What about South Sudan, which had only existed as an independent country for about six months when Morgan started the project?) and there are mentions of readers and authors who post Morgan their favourite books from any particular country. But, by and large, the mechanics and experience of the reading challenge are largely absent from the book.

I was a bit disappointed by that, I’ll confess. I love reading about reading, particularly the difficult challenges – I think particularly of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair or The Whole Five Feet – and those books often become de facto memoirs. That makes them all the stronger, in my opinion. For whatever reason, Morgan’s book is not that. Perhaps the publisher, or she, decided that readers could already find all that information on her blog. So what The World Between Two Covers is really is a series of essays that are borne of the experience – not about the experience itself. On those terms, is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection.

There are sections on self-publishing and electronic books, on writing under totalitarian regimes, on book banning, on the legacies of imperialism. Morgan covers an enormous spectrum of topics and her research is extraordinary. I didn’t learn a huge amount about the almost 200 books she read, though a fair few are mentioned (almost never evaluatively), but I learned a lot about all sorts of other things. The legacies of her reading, rather than her actual reading. For instance, I loved the chapter on culture shock and the things that are left unexplained for an audience that will not need the holding hand, but which become baffling for an audience in translation. It was also about how we orient ourselves as readers, for better or worse.

In the absence of anything else, we tend to draw on our own experiences to make the best of things as go along. Because reading is an active process in which , as Wolfgang Iser has it , we participate by ‘filling in the gaps left by the text’, we search for things to plug the interpretative holes crying out for our attention. We look for equivalences between what we are engaged in imagining and what we have encountered before – just as in real life we might reach for a comparison to help others picture a place that they have never been, dubbing Montreal the Paris of the West, for instance, or Udaipur the Venice of the East. When I read Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Kon’s The Bleeding of the Stone during my project, I found myself repeatedly drawn to make comparisons between the novel’s poetic evocation of the age-old practices of the Bedouian and the mournful homage to the rural traditions in the works of Thomas Hardy. The parallel may have some truth to it – both writers have negative things to say about the effect of progress on people who live off, and steward, the land – but it is also distorting, because expectations based on Hardy have no place in Al-Koni’s novel. If I were to give in to the temptation to read the novel in Hardy’s terms, I would find the gory denouement – in which the lone Bedouin protagonist Asouf is crucified – inexplicable and nonsensical. The jolt between what I anticipate and what comes would be too violent and I would have no option but to reject the story as absurd.

It’s a fascinating chapter, and naturally doesn’t come up with any hard-and-fast conclusions. But it did challenge my expectations on how much I can learn about a culture by reading fiction from it – particularly fiction aimed primarily at people also from that culture. And often, of course, in translation.

On that note, I found the chapter on translation particularly interesting. Perhaps the championing of translators isn’t something the book blogging world needs to hear as much as others, but it remains shameful that so few books published in the UK (and other English-speaking countries in the West) are in translation. We see so little of the world’s literature, and the things we do get are often filtered through such rigorous expectations that we only get what the publishing industry knows we won’t find too unsettling. As Morgan notes, that means that Scandinavian crime novels are translated – because they fit our expectations of what crime novels should be – while other cultures aren’t represented in our bookshops at all. I noticed last year that there were enormous numbers of Japanese books about cats available in translation – but not that much else. I can’t imagine that Japanese authors solely write whimsical books about cats (welcome though they are).

Not all the books Morgan reads are in translation. There were, of course, those already written by people from English-speaking countries – but other writers choose English as their language even when it is not their mother tongue. It opens them up to a wider market, and in some cases is a safer language to write in. The only book from her list that I have read is a case in point – Ilustrado by Filipino author Miguel Syjuco – though English is also an official language of the Philippines alongside Filipino (a standardised version of Tagalog).

When I went to look up Morgan’s review of Ilustrado, there was a grumpy comment from someone saying “This was a bad choice for a book representing the Philippines. […] I’m sorry you chose this.” As Morgan points out in her reply, no book could represent an entire country and that isn’t the aim of the challenge. But she also wants something that isn’t too unrepresentative – which is why she isn’t interested in (say) a book by a Brit about visiting the Philippines. Earlier in the book, she discusses whether or not her choice of book needs to be set in the country in question at all:

For the most part, however, just as residency in a place is only part of the picture when it comes to human beings’ sense of national and cultural identity, so setting makes for a rather one-sided approach when it comes to the quest for authenticity in literature from around the world. After all, if national identity is as much about thoughts, feelings and perspective as it is about physical presence in a region, then surely the cultural uniqueness or specialness of a work is likely to be located as much in its voice and mindset and assumptions underpinning it as in its setting, if not far more so. When you think about it, there’s no reason why a Zimbabwean work about a kingdom under the sea couldn’t every bit as enlightening, thought-provoking and culturally specific as the most faithful portrayal of life in Mugabe’s Harare.

This paragraph gave me pause for thought. I don’t think I entirely agree. It’s why, when I was looking for recommendations for Canadian novelist Helen Humphreys, I disregarded the ones set in the UK. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out the ‘kingdom under the sea’ option, but I don’t want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Nigeria as much as I want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Zimbabwe. Yes, the ‘cultural uniqueness or specialness’ is going to be found in ‘voice and mindset and assumptions’ (of course, every country will have as many of those as it does citizens) as much as the setting – but why not get both? To truly engage with a country, I want to read a book set in that country by an author from that country – ideally set in a time they know, too. But I recognise that is my own set of wishes and requisites, not a universal law.

Morgan’s book is continually thought-provoking, as well as engagingly written. It feels conversational as well as knowledgeable, and it’s a lovely combination. As I say, it isn’t the book I thought I was getting when I started it – but it’s very good at what it’s aiming to do.

2023: Some Reading Stats

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Reading people’s favourite books of the year, and their reading stats, is always my favourite period of the book blogging calendar. Here are mine – and here’s the link to the 2022 stats, which I’ll be comparing to quite a lot.

Number of books read
I read 180 books, which is actually 21 fewer than 2022 (though still a big number). I think the drop is because of the issues with my eyes I had earlier in the year, which have returned – albeit thankfully much more mildly – for the final four months of the year, since I had Covid. I’m still able to read but not quite as easily as I’d hope.

Number of audiobooks
Audiobooks don’t need 100%-working eyes, of course! And I managed to listen to 67 last year – meaning I read 113 print books. (In 2022 it was 64, so about the same.)

Male/female writers
I read 124 books by women and 56 by men – making my reading 69% female. In 2022 it was 71%, in 2021 it was 70%. I never set out with goals, but somehow it always ends up around there.

Fiction/non-fiction
I read 135 works of fiction and 45 works of non-fiction – meaning my non-fiction reading accounted for just over a quarter of the total. And yet produced my top three favourite books of the year! The big change in 2023 from the previous few years was that I read 30 non-fiction books by women and 15 by men – this has usually ended up being the category where men outpaced women.

Books in translation
A slight drop on 2022 (13) and 2021 (11) at ten books. They were translated from Polish x2, Japanese x2, Dutch, French, Italian, Hebrew, Russian and Marathi.

Re-reads
I re-read 14 books in 2023 – and that includes three Mary Lawson novels and five books by Alice Oseman. As usual, re-reading was mostly for podcast or book club. But I did re-read Miss Hargreaves (on audiobook) for the first time in years, and that was a delight.

New-to-me authors
This was a category I could tell was quite low throughout the year. It hasn’t been the easiest year, and I definitely wanted the dependability of authors I trusted (though, interestingly, not enough to re-read!) So 69 of my 180 books were by new-to-me authors. In the past it’s been nearer 50%.

Most disappointing book
It’s always the ones you think you’ll love, isn’t it? I was disappointed to find South Riding by Winifred Holtby so formless and tedious, after years of anticipating enjoying it. And while I didn’t dislike it so much, I wanted The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence to be much better than it was, after loving A Jest of God so much.

Animals in book titles
Mostly birds and cats this year. The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge, A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence, Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit, If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura, The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Notsukawa, The ABC of Cats by Beverley Nichols, A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye, Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse, Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile, Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes, Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, Cuckoo in June by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford,  Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale and, if it counts, The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish.

Names in book titles
Ever since doing Project Names, I’ve kept an eye on this. In the past couple of years it’s been 18 and 35. In 2023, it was 16. That’s an awful lot of books without names in the title, isn’t it?

Favourite title
I loved Divorce? Of Course by Mary Essex, which was also a fun, if entirely predictable, novel.

Most shocking title
Of course, Jeanette McCurdy’s title I’m Glad My Mom Died is meant to be shocking – and it is quite the attention-grabber. Especially since it’s non-fiction.

Title that fooled a friend
My friend Naomi was keen to read The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt when she saw me reading it, until she realised it was not actually about wool.

Books by people I know
Four in 2023! My friends Tom Carlisle and Noreen Masud – and both my parents! Five if you count Sarra Manning (which I do, really) as she is an online friend I’ve not actually met.

Persephones
I’m always keen to read more of my Persephone backlog. In 2023, I read… none. Oh dear!

Strange things that happened in books this year

A virgin gives birth, a portrait narrates a novel, a house conceals an evil void, a solider travels through time, coffee-drinkers travel through time, time speeds up while listening to records, a census-taker disappears, League of Nations members disappear, members of a family are steadily bumped off, a made-up octogenarian comes to life, cats guard a magical library, someone considering suicide is transported to a magical library, someone considering suicide messages all the contacts in their phone, a phone call tells you it’s your day to die, form-fillers predict the future, cats disappear from the world, and a man meets his ideal woman on a dream bus made of bamboo and rice paper.